I don't enjoy CAH either. I have had some incredibly funny people in my life before and was able to play off their antics to have genuinely fun and creative con

I don't enjoy CAH either. I have had some incredibly funny people in my life before and was able to play off their antics to have genuinely fun and creative conversations. CAH is that without the creativity (which is where the fun comes from for me). My current social group loves it so I have to sit through games occasionally... I can stave off boredom by finding combinations with as many layers as possible, but people usually don't notice. I think my preference is more geared toward improv, so I'm considering trying that. I don't know Haskell but I've started trying to learn it a couple times. Haskell is close to how I think about problems, not sure how close yet, but I can tell it would be a great tool if I took the time to learn it. I'd probably learn a lot about how to think about problems if I did use it, and that's probably what happens for other people. It's such a major paradigm shift from the 'usual' methods that it's raised to an exalted status. If you try to solve problems without using state and with static types you can get to almost the same place regardless of language, it's just harder to implement. I've been working in Java 6 with a team firmly rooted in OO the last few years and often wish I had monads...