What is Good About Haskell?

ARANK

Posted on October 2, 2019Beginners to Haskell are often confused as to what’s so great about the language. Much of the proselytizing online focuses on pretty abstract (and often poorly defined) concepts like “purity”, “strong types”, and (god forbid) “monads”. These things are difficult to understand, somewhat controversial, and not obviously beneficial (especially when you’ve only been using the language for a short amount of time).The real tragedy is that Haskell (and other ML-family languages) are packed with simple, decades-old features like pattern matching and algebraic data types which have massive, clear benefits and few (if any) downsides. Some of these ideas are finally filtering in to mainstream languages (like Swift and Rust) where they’re used to great effect, but the vast majority of programmers out there haven’t yet been exposed to them.This post aims to demonstrate some of these features in a simple (but hopefully not too simple) example. I’m going to write …