Having programmed both in Haskell and Java, my experience is very different. In Java you have to "please the compiler" all of the time. Most of the types you a

Having programmed both in Haskell and Java, my experience is very different. In Java you have to "please the compiler" all of the time. Most of the types you add don't help in finding bugs. The type system is not expressive enough for real general types, because subtyping gets in the way. In Haskell, the experience is very different: Writing down a general type first guides you in writing the code. Or, conversely, writing down the code first and then looking at the inferred type sometimes gives you clues to modify your code to make it better. The Haskell syntax is more terse, so a lot more trivial errors (typos etc.) are caught by the type checker. And the type checker really shines when refactoring code. And my code is actually not "bug-aversive", I do make a lot of trivial mistakes all of the time. And I'm glad when the type checker catches them.