[198d]

My biggest desire to learn a language like Haskell or Scala would be the total shift in thinking required to grasp the language (the author mentions this). I've started playing with clojure lately and even though I've barely scratched the surface (primarily poking around 4clojure.com) I could already feel my brain twisting in ways I've never experienced before. I firmly believe once you turn that corner and really start to get it, you start seeing and attacking problems in such a different light that there's no going back. The big problem I've had recently is finding the motivation to learn anything outside of work (programming/engineering related at least); once you start getting paid to do something its really hard to do it for free, haha.