The most important parts of this article, IMHO: The bit that stirs me up is that this “stuff” isn’t, repeat is not, Haskell-specific. Its rooted in the fabric

The most important parts of this article, IMHO: The bit that stirs me up is that this “stuff” isn’t, repeat is not, Haskell-specific. Its rooted in the fabric of our reality, in our mathematics and our problem domains, and bits poke up like the tips of icebergs into mainstream OO languages, their true structure part-revealed. But rarely in the OO-world have I found such carefully abstracted and subtle techniques of programming in daily use. Ideas from Haskell & Functional Programming will continue to flow into the mainstream over the next couple of decades. This is why it's important to read about things like immutable data structures and higher-kinded polymorphism, even if your problem domain (or personal / corporate style) is utterly unsuited to existing functional programming languages. This stuff isn't just obscure tricks for maths nerds to obsess over, it's fundamental to how programming works. If you want to understand LINQ, you need to understand higher-kinded polymorphism and monads. If you're writing a series of chained callbacks in Javascript and feel like there's some repetition you'd like to extract but can't quite put your finger on, you need to understand the continuation monad (I'm only about halfway there...) If you want to reason sensibly about concurrent updates to complex data structures, it helps a lot to know about immutable structure-sharing data structures.