[fjh]

> Haskell could be wonderful. Never tried it. Will someday. Until then, I'd love some sort of competition where a Haskell programmer and myself are given a task, like "write a script to X," where X is some real-world relevant task and not an academic puzzle, and see who finishes it first. It would be illuminating, since I'd give myself about a 30% chance of finishing first, but it would reveal what I'm lacking.

I think one of Haskell's biggest marketing problems is that its strong points (strong static types + separation of side effects) aren't all that important in scripts (or any program that's small enough to fit in someone's head in its entirety), which makes it difficult to convince people of its merits in reasonably-sized examples.

What Haskell gives you are good, solid abstraction boundaries that you cannot accidentally break, and the ability to refactor code with a high degree of confidence that it's still going to work fine afterwards.

Neither of those are particularly helpful for any program that you might write in a competion, but both are incredibly important in day-to-day software development.