Learning Haskell makes you a better programmer?

[Chris]

On Thursday, 27 December 2012 at 11:45:45 UTC, Russel Winder 
wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-12-26 at 22:48 +0100, bearophile wrote:
>> Russel Winder:
> Practical experience, i.e. actually using it for real on real 
> projects,
> indicates that Clojure is an excellent language and very usable.
> Moreover many people (*) building systems are actually working 
> with
> Clojure and finding it a huge boon. Also Uncle Bob tells us it 
> is the
> final programming language ;-)
>
> The JVM language set is definitely now Java, Scala, Groovy, 
> Clojure.
>
>
> (*) OK mostly young entrepreneurial types doing start-ups.

It all depends on who you are catering for and what you are 
developing. If you have to develop cross-platform applications 
with (possibly) graphical user interfaces any Java based 
technology (ironically enough!) can quickly turn into a 
nightmare. There's always at least one serious pitfall and I have 
learned that you cannot pass the burden of dealing with things 
like JVMs on to the user. Also, over the years I have taken a 
dislike to "ideological" languages that dictate a certain 
paradigm or coding style (Python). What attracted me to D was the 
lack of "ideology" (multi-paradigm) and its natively-compiled 
cross-platform approach with easy C/C++-integration. Before I 
discovered D I was at a loss trying to find a modern language (= 
concise and productive) that would work natively on different 
platforms, because I am working in a small team and "write once 
run everywhere" is really important. All other features like pure 
and safe programming, unit tests, contract programming etc. are 
nice and helpful (_optional_) features but were not a top 
priority. From my point of view the only really important issue 
is concurrency programming, multithreading and everything related 
to it.

One of the biggest strengths of D is the philosophy "Well, you 
needn't...but you can of course"