On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 04:53:43PM -0700, Dennis Raddle wrote:

I love Haskell for the fact that my programs have relatively few bugs other than typos or obvious mistakes in types that the compiler catches. I just wrote about 100 lines of code to do a fairly complex task, which is to make a map of changing loudness in a musical document (including slopes, not just flat level changes) and after I got the typos out and it compiled, it just worked.

I have been a professional programmer in imperative languages for 20 years, so I can think pretty accurately about what I am doing, but I'm new to Haskell, and it's a marked difference in the ease of getting something to work right.

This has been my experience too. Haskell is not magic, but it does help eliminate a large class of silly mistakes: the kind of mistakes that everyone makes no matter how experienced. So it frees you up to only make more interesting mistakes; and if you are an experienced programmer you don't make as many of those. So you often get programs that work the first time, which is (as you know!) a singularly unsettling and heady experience. -Brent