Learn Haskell: Lesson 1: Hello, World!

Beyond "stretching your mind", I need a compelling reason to learn Haskell. I think that that marketing aspect of programming languages is something lots of academics tend to forget about. Erlang, for instance, is far more interesting because it clearly does a couple of things much better than the competition. And indeed, I have been, and currently am paid to work on Erlang code.

It's not just "can you do real stuff with it?". Of course you can. The real question is what exactly does it do that is so much better than other languages that there is a reason to learn a whole new language just to get that thing.