The Haskell designers spent some time figuring out how the language might be made useful, yet elegant. Consequently it's among the most useful of FunctionalProgrammingLanguages?. You can do IO, for example. Haskell is probably most famous for having lazy evaluation.
CH tries to decide whether or not to resist randomly learning another language - and if so, whether he should start his functional experience with another language.
Just like procedural languages, all functional languages are one ;) I think there's probably more ml experience here than haskell, but it's the underlying concept that takes most work to get. --Vitenka
If you're gonna try a functional language, you probably want to learn either ML or Haskell. And GHC is about 1 million times easier to learn than ML using SMLNJ (but caML is quite easy to use), so if you're gonna try a functional language... --Mjb67. (By the way if you use caML you miss out on the best feature of SML, its modules system.
(PeterTaylor) SMLNJ? I thought the two main distros, as it were, were Moscow and Edinburgh (which includes Cambridge, being Edinburgh with a graphical interface added by ArthurNorman, although its memory allocation doesn't stand up to drawing the MandelbrotSet. Why are you looking at me like that?)
MoonShadow once got emailed a set of past paper questions on Haskell by a friend of a friend who was doing compsci at Swansea and wanted a hand. He found it very similar to ML - so much so that after a few minutes looking at the syntax differences, the Swansea questions could be answered without further reference; which would imply it's trivial to pick up for anyone who did CompSci at Cambridge. MoonShadow would advise practicing problem-solving in the basic language using the interactive shell before investigating libraries, modules, I/O possibilities, graphics etc. - he still has a set of ML coursework questions around if those are helpful to anyone.
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