Let's talk in things that are more tangible. Haskell attempts to answer the question: "In the set of all possible programs that can be written to solve a certai

Let's talk in things that are more tangible. Haskell attempts to answer the question: "In the set of all possible programs that can be written to solve a certain problem domain how do I find the program that has the best modularity, best design and best safety?" You would think that to answer the question above you would need a really expressive language. Haskell is a language that is actually less expressive and more restrictive than mainstream programming languages. You can be much more expressive in JAVA, C, C++, python, javascript and python then you can in haskell. For one you can mutate variables and re-assign them in mainstream languages and you can also have Loops. These things don't exist in Haskell. Sounds really bad right? In actuality this is what makes haskell so powerful. Haskell is restricting the programmer to only be able to create a program that is much, much closer to answering the question above. The best design and the best modularity sort of exist has nebulous and instinctive concepts in most programmers. With haskell this concept comes closer to concreteness because Haskell simply doesn't allow you to write certain programs that are poorly designed or incorrect. My first experience writing a non trivial haskell program was astonishing. Normally I program a little and test a little, then continuously add complexity to my programs through this iterative process of coding a little and testing a little. With haskell I coded the entire program. Once it compiled it worked. No testing needed. I asked myself what was it that allowed me to do this in haskell? The answer was that it was because haskell prevented me from writing more programs that were incorrect. Errors and mistakes you would normally have to test for in other language can't even be compiled in Haskell. Nothing can totally eliminate testing but with haskell you can eliminate a huge portion of testing. So much so that programmers in haskell spend more time trying to get a program to compile than trying to test. This power extends to refactoring. Most projects out there have problem domains that aren't fully defined and thus require refactoring changes in the future to better fit the problem domain. It's an inevitability. It often happens that such refactorings require massive and dangerous changes to code that has already accumulated immense complexity. A common problem like this becomes trivial in haskell. Haskell forces your code to be modular so that such changes happen easily. The type system also ensures that if you do a change that is incorrect the compiler will catch it. From a less tangible standpoint haskell also feels right. When you design things in other programming languages you're not sure where to cut your modules and how to correctly divide responsibility of your code and of course your mistakes become apparent over time. Haskell doesn't feel this way. It feels like the right approach to design and building primitives that snap together like legos. Over time this feeling will coalesce into understanding. You will completely understand why haskell programs are better designed then programs written in other languages. I never mentioned performance. Although Haskell is very performant, haskell isn't suppose to answer the question of performance AND design (that's more rust) haskell just addresses design and safety. Additionally, it's not just haskell that has these qualities. It's actually the whole family of functional ML languages that haskell comes from that utilize Algebraic Data types and functional programming. You can achieve sort of the same philosophy I describe here by using something like Ocaml or Elm. Also don't let the fact that haskell isn't mainstream put you off. Although it's not as practical, learning it is like taking the red pill. You'll never be the same.