I'd say it depends on which languages you already know/have been exposed to.
After downloading some software written in Haskell this week, I installed GHC and got some books on Haskell. Got sick of constantly hearing about how cool it is! After reading a few dozen pages, I thought it looked a lot like (Standard) ML, which I got into a couple of years ago. So I googled differences between Haskell and ML, and they indeed sound not-so-very-different. So I gave up on that idea for now. I was after a language very different from any I knew before. Maybe next year. (In recent years have gotten into Lisp, Prolog, Forth, ML, Tcl etc - each totally different from each other and from languages I knew before.)
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. - Alan Perliss
I initially picked up Haskell because I hadn't done anything that was lazy by default, which - when you focus on pulling at that thread - can be a pretty big difference from any of the ones you've mentioned.
The syntax is pretty close to ML, for sure.
Ultimately, it's the type system and the pervasive immutability that I miss most when I'm working in other languages. The ML type system is related, but the differences (in both directions!) are interesting.
If you were never exposed to functional programming before, learning Haskell will give you a whole new perspective on how you write code, and I bet it will make you a better programmer just because of that.
With that said, in Europe I ever came across exactly zero job ads that require Haskell, and exactly one in Singapore. In North America / Bay Area it might be more common though.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] threadHonestly though, I prefer ocaml much more than haskell because it has a cleaner syntax.
That's interesting. One typically hears the other way round. Could you give some examples?
After downloading some software written in Haskell this week, I installed GHC and got some books on Haskell. Got sick of constantly hearing about how cool it is! After reading a few dozen pages, I thought it looked a lot like (Standard) ML, which I got into a couple of years ago. So I googled differences between Haskell and ML, and they indeed sound not-so-very-different. So I gave up on that idea for now. I was after a language very different from any I knew before. Maybe next year. (In recent years have gotten into Lisp, Prolog, Forth, ML, Tcl etc - each totally different from each other and from languages I knew before.)
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. - Alan Perliss
The syntax is pretty close to ML, for sure.
Ultimately, it's the type system and the pervasive immutability that I miss most when I'm working in other languages. The ML type system is related, but the differences (in both directions!) are interesting.
With that said, in Europe I ever came across exactly zero job ads that require Haskell, and exactly one in Singapore. In North America / Bay Area it might be more common though.