> some people from IRC got me to try the Code Jam. I thought I'd use Haskell, being very familiar with it, and the experience was a most illuminating disaster.

> some people from IRC got me to try the Code Jam. I thought I'd use Haskell, being very familiar with it, and the experience was a most illuminating disaster. On the other hand, C++ worked out pretty well, even though I was a total cargo cult functional programming weenie at the time and had a real bad attitude about C++ Were you familiar with pure functional data structures and algorithms or at least simulating imperative ones with ST when needed? If not, I don't think you can fairly say that Haskell is bad for programming contests whereas C++ worked out pretty well. You at least need to compare the two with an equivalent knowledge of implementing algorithms with each, not that figuring out or even approximating that equivalence would be easy . > You'll find yourself much more aware of how much time you spend stumbling over functional code after that. I'm well aware of when/how much I stumble over functional code since I still have vastly more experience with the imperative paradigm. All I can do is try and keep an open mind to logical arguments and keep writing code in multiple languages and multiple paradigms to know what the best answer is for a given scenario or set of scenarios. > how keyboard users often overlook cases where using a mouse would be more efficient Don't see how this is relevant, but I'll bite... what cases would this be? I of course agree that gaming or navigating a 3d world is better with a mouse, but I struggle to see where programming related tasks would be better suited to using mouse.