Haskell vs. procedural programming in the real world [closed]

Question

Haskell isn't as hard as people like to make out to learn. Haskell opens up a new world that you never knew existed for you. It's as valuable to learn as any other language. You might not find a job requiring you to do Haskell programming, but does that really mean a language isn't valuable?

Haskell will teach you a lot of new stuff, and it will show you how to program even better in the languages you /do/ work with. You can do your own personal projects in your spare time with it.

Haskell isn't really used much in the "real world" if you define "real world" as "cash generator". So if that is your objective, then you might have to rethink objectives :p

Also, I don't really like that part of chosen "how to learn haskell" answer. It takes months to years to master any language, not just Haskell. Depending on how you define "master". I can use Haskell to a pretty good degree of efficiency and I've only been learning it for a month, and I've been taking it slow even.

If nothing else, the change in mindset that learning Haskell provides will help you when you have to go back to using those procedural languages that still are used in the workplace.

The functional paradigm is beginning to make it's way into various mainstream applications and languages - Even C++ is going to be adding a (crippled) lambda in C++0x.

You may also want to look at some of the hybrid languages like Scala or OCaml. Scala is being used at Twitter, and OCaml is being used at Jane's Street in a financial trading platform.

I learned Haskell because it was by far the best functional language that I tried out of Scala, Clojure, OCaml and Scheme but I didn't seriously expect to use it for work.

As it turns out, it is perfect for those sorts of odd jobs that are too small for a team and would be just too time consuming in Java. So far, I've used it for ad-hoc data migrations i.e. mangling CSV exports into another format, batch conversions of XML (HXT is more concise and more powerful than XSLT), screen-scraping off the internet and software project estimating including modelling risk using the probability monad and producing optimum gantt charts using backtracking. This is all real work that needed doing, that I wouldn't have even bothered to try and do in Java as it would be a multi-day undertaking.

I now use it instead of Excel for anything vaguely mathematical as it is little more effort to create a list of values in haskell source in a text editor than it is to type them into Excel. Once in haskell, I can then do all sorts of magic like backtracking, probability distributions etc. that Excel can't do. If I need a graph then I spit the values out as CSV (2 lines of code) and load them into Excel.

The only downside is that it does take several months to get proficient, but worth the effort IMHO.

You probably shouldn't expect to use Haskell anywhere nearly as often as a C family language in professional settings. If the question is whether it will be valuable for you to study Haskell and functional programming paradigms, the answer is yes. You can apply your enriched understanding of programming to all of your work.