haskell's niche: PL theory research. as a professor of mine said, "it's an incubator for PL theory". that said, are there merits to non-PL researchers learning

haskell's niche: PL theory research. as a professor of mine said, "it's an incubator for PL theory". that said, are there merits to non-PL researchers learning it? i think so. for one, the functional paradigm is increasingly being integrated into the mainstream languages and the "genpop" is starting to use FP concepts to solve problems. haskell is supposedly "the purest" functional language. therefore, if you like FP, studying haskell is like tapping into "the source". while i find functional constructs aesthetically more pleasing than imperative ones, a reason i often hear given in support of using functional languages is the promise they offer w.r.t concurrency/parallelism. in the words of the same professor i quoted earlier, "concurrency/parallelism is currently broken in most other languages. it's like building skyscrapers atop matchsticks". i believe this now. i also believe haskell's approach to be quite a big step in the right direction (STM and atomically). an outstanding paper on the topic exists here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/stm/beautiful.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... regarding haskell's type system...in my opinion, hands down the best currently in existence. yes, it's hard to work with at times. i strongly disliked it at first. yes, the type errors can be a bit cryptic at times, at least until one gets used to them. the upside? there be real magics there. and i'm not talking about devices that begin with the letter i. the majority of the time, if i can get code to type check it works flawlessly. working with it over the last 6 months has really changed my thinking about programming languages and has actually swayed me to go further in that direction in my studies. don't mean to sound like a fool in love, but ...