[proper_elb]

To add to this: A bit similar to Lisp, due to the different compiler plugins, Haskell is more like a family of dialects. One can be pretty vanilla about what the types should protect against, but one can also build arcane type-magic buildings that rely on the newest PL research.

Simple, vanilla Haskell is approximated more and more by the mainstream languages: Optional types, andThen().orElse() and friends and other things - which I am really happy about!

Why not use a more mainstream langauge then? For me, there are at least 3 hard reasons:

1) The stuff mentioned above is old, battle-tested and deeply embedded into the language and the community - it feels ergonomic to use.

2) IO-being-a-library is a paradigm that produces programs that I love to maintain, also when others written them.

3) Haskell has nice interfaces that I miss in mainstream languages, Functor and Monad for example. My prediction is that in around 5 years, mainstream languages will start to offer these kind of interfaces - starting from "Wait, what else can we do with andThen() and optional chaining and so on?"