[nxn]

Yes, I completely agree with this. I don't see much advantage in knowing languages that all look and behave very similarly to each other. Why should the only reasonable choice be no choice at all? Though, I suppose, that's probably saying too much.

On a side note, and perhaps I'm biased in believing this, but I find the given Haskell "expression" like syntax to be much easier to understand than reading imperative code. Of course, you have to know some fundamentals behind functional programming before it starts making much sense, but once that ground work is there, the experience of reading other people's code is quite enjoyable. To me, it just seems like the code is more concerned with the problem it's trying to solve than battling the nature of the machine that it is running on.