Reflections on leaving Haskell

I'm not arguing that Haskell can't improve in a lot of ways, but his complaints all seem to stem from attempting to program in Haskell using idioms that don't work well there. If you want to incrementally add to a data structure, use currying, or multiple constructors if that fits better. Don't use Maybes, and definitely don't subclass datatypes. He doesn't really seem to understand monads at all. If you want to log something, use a monad like Writer, not IO.

The problem with Haskell is that it is way ahead of its time, in kind of the same way that lisp was ahead of its time.<p>lisp had high order functions and garbage collection, and now 30 years later all mainstream languages have these features.<p>Haskell has lazy evaluation, compiler enforced function purity and a type checker that doesn't get in your way. I predict that in 30 years all mainstream languages will have these features.

The reasons against Haskell in this article are quite shallow and he would benefit from more knowledge (Why putting functions in the IO Monad to log/write stuff ??).<p>Real reasons I have against Haskell are it's complexity: compare it to the average readability of Python. Often, to resolve a tough problem, you have to upgrade your "level", which can be considered good (you tend to resolve it in an intellectually satisfying way) or bad (others have to understand it...).

<i>"And without Haskell I would be trapped in Scala-land, writing syntax-sugared-Java, confused about why functional programming was so great…"</i>