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This is exactly what happened to me: I did not take a further look on Haskell just because its syntax seemed so weird.

That's like saying you don't want to learn things you don't already know.

With that kind of attitude, you're not going to learn very much. You should take the opposite approach: be more interested the weirder the thing is.

Being interesting is not enough when you are picking a language for your next major project.