Stateless programming is what the craze is all about. A lot of programmers grew up on C-style "x = 3;" kind of programming, so to write 500 good lines of code

Stateless programming is what the craze is all about. A lot of programmers grew up on C-style "x = 3;" kind of programming, so to write 500 good lines of code without an assignment operator can be a bit like walking down the street on your fingertips. There is nothing special about Haskell. Every single one of its qualities have been / will be reimplemented in other languages. Do not stare at the tree that is Haskell: talk about the forest that is PL research / features. For example, Shen is a great mindbender close in "power" to Haskell. It's a Lisp, it has an [inferential] static type checker, and only 2 functions in Klambda aren't referentially transparent. Personally I dislike Haskell's syntax and think Worse is Better, anyways. ;)