Stanford CS240h, Functional Systems in Haskell

When I was at student at Imperial College, London, programming 1 was all taught in Haskell <a href="http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/teaching/coursedetails/120.1" rel="nofollow">http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/teaching/coursedetails/120.1</a><p>It seemed like a silly idea then, but in hindsight was a genius move. It normalised the class (prior knowledge in a real didn't matter), and taught programming from first principles. Picking up new languages after this was significancy easier.

I am not a computer scientist by training. Can someone experienced in Haskell convince me why I should take time to learn it? I do tons of technical/statistical computing (python, Matlab, R) and some web-based projects (database driven mostly). Having math background I can see how FP is elegant and sexy, but what are real practical advantages over OOP or Matlab-style programming?

Is it just me or does anyone else always feels overwhelmed reading the project suggestions? I find the projects listed to be extremely challenging. Project suggestions - <a href="http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/labs/project.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/labs/project.html</a>

To my dismay CS240h was not offered again this year, probably because David Mazieres is teaching CS140 (Operating Systems) instead.

I went through the notes. They are concise, but not too concise. A nice tutorial for people who already know the basics. <a href="http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/notes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11au-cs240h/notes/</a>

At first I thought "Oh wow, video lectures a la Coursera, awesome", unfortunately these are just written materials.<p>I'm a little surprised at how little love FP gets at the Courseras, EDXs and Udacities of the world. The only thing that's going on at the moment is Martin Odersky's FP principles in Scala.