[howling]

I have a similar experience at Oxford. However, the introduction course doesn't even cover IO monad and all of our code are run in repl. No wonder the students regard Haskell as impractical as they did not even write a full program in it.

[foldr]

Still, if they'd found that Haskell was much easier or more productive to use than other programming languages for simple computational tasks, you'd think a few of them might have googled 'how do do IO in Haskell' and gone from there.

[tome]

That seems to be getting things backwards. How could they find it easier or more productive if they haven't even done IO yet?

[foldr]

I would say the productivity gains of Haskell are actually most transparently obvious in the case of the sort of toy algorithmic code you're likely to be writing in a compsci class.

[tome]

OK. And I would say the productivity gains of Haskell are most transparently obvious in the case of the sort of highly complex, stateful, I/O-interacting code you're likely to be writing for a successful tech company.

[foldr]

This doesn’t match my personal experience (having worked on a Haskell web app professionally for a couple of years). GHC does have some cool features like STM, but typical stateful code tends not to be radially more concise or easier to write in Haskell than in other high level languages (compared to, say, code for traversing a binary tree, or implementing a parser combinator library). Others may have different experiences.