After downloading some software written in Haskell this week, I installed GHC and got some books on Haskell. Got sick of constantly hearing about how cool it is! After reading a few dozen pages, I thought it looked a lot like (Standard) ML, which I got into a couple of years ago. So I googled differences between Haskell and ML, and they indeed sound not-so-very-different. So I gave up on that idea for now. I was after a language very different from any I knew before. Maybe next year. (In recent years have gotten into Lisp, Prolog, Forth, ML, Tcl etc - each totally different from each other and from languages I knew before.)
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. - Alan Perliss
The syntax is pretty close to ML, for sure.
Ultimately, it's the type system and the pervasive immutability that I miss most when I'm working in other languages. The ML type system is related, but the differences (in both directions!) are interesting.
Honestly though, I prefer ocaml much more than haskell because it has a cleaner syntax.
That's interesting. One typically hears the other way round. Could you give some examples?
With that said, in Europe I ever came across exactly zero job ads that require Haskell, and exactly one in Singapore. In North America / Bay Area it might be more common though.