This feels like a low-content article. The only thing I can get out of it is: Learning Haskell teaches you language features and patterns that you can take to other languages. As an FP dabbler I agree, but I wish there were more to this.

> approximately 50-hour training course

Is this really long enough to achieve anything? That's like "FP 101 (one semester)" if you don't take the time to do the homework.

Feels like a gentle claim that "Haskell is best", in that the author thinks that Haskell people have an edge even when coding in other languages, because (somehow) they'll have seen it in Haskell already. I'm not sure I buy that claim, but OK.

I am convinced that no perfect lingua franca exists, and that even the best, richest, languages you can think of, with giant ecosystems and millions of users, have massive holes that guarantee another language has a meaty role. C is the closest, and whole industries have been borne trying to solve its problems.

If I was in charge of Educating The Young, I would ask that they learn C, something culturally descendant from C, and something wildly different from it.

(It occurs to me that one could make exactly the same comment about human languages too, which is why contract lawyers exist, I suppose. And my advice there would be to maybe learn English, German/French, and then something unrelated, like Mandarin Chinese. Or Finnish. I do feel strongly that learning a second language gives you new ways of thinking that are not easily available in your mother tongue.)

I definitely feel like each programming language I've learned contributed uniquely to my mindset as a hacker. And even ones that didn't really contribute to my thinking, opened up new doors. For example, C opened up open source (as a kind of lingua franca), JS opened up the browser, Hoon opened up Urbit, etc.

The most fun I've had coding was in SQL, making it do algorithms. It's actually surprisingly well-suited.

I also really enjoyed learning x86 assembly.

More important than languages are ecosystems, communities, and technological traditions. Like Unix. Becoming a Unix hacker, or an Urbit hacker, or playing CTFs, you kind of learn a whole little computational ethos that you carry with you forever. The programming language fits into that bigger picture.

When I was in University I took a course that focused on a set of problems to be solved. Each assignment in the course was solving them using a different language. Thinking back the languages were: - C - C++ - ASM - Haskell - Lisp - Java - Eiffel - Modula - Prolog - Perl

It was an awesome course, you learned over time how some languages were better suited for certain tasks than others.

It reinforced the idea of using the right tool for the job. While a solution was feasible or verbose in some of the languages in others it was simple or concise.

I also remember thinking Java was really nice to use. Lives the automatic garbage collection and not having to think about dangling pointers.

Also that Perl was frustrating.

It would be interesting to know why many of their projects are gradually transitioning to other languages. If someone paid me for programing in Haskell I would never voluntarily switch to something more boring.

Sounds like the Haskell version of Eric S. Raymond's oft quoted claim about Lisp: "Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

Come on Justin, you used to write spicier articles when I worked at stackbuilders. What happened?