When I read Ben Hutchison‘s OO/Imperative programmers: ‘Study Functional Programming or Be Ignorant’ I knew I had too much to say for the comments, so I figured I’d put in my 2 cents here.

Haskell is my go-to language, both for scripting, and for getting work done. This is not because of any particular allegiance to the language. Haskell and I have an open relationship, and the moment I find a language that out-Haskells Haskell, you can be sure I’ll move on.

Here I want to describe my favorite things about Haskell. You’ll note that they are all about the type-system. I don’t feel too strongly one way or the other about laziness, or about monads (though I won’t give them up without first finding something to take their place). I don’t even particularly care that it’s a functional language, in as much as I can have these features in a non-functional environment.

Some of these features are already available elsewhere. This is wonderful! If you know of any examples of this, please tell me in the comments.

This is a list of my favorite things:

(more…)