Dear Niels-Oliver, having some relation to DH and working in my student's job with (dirty-tagsoup) XML. Struck by Haskells beauty and clearness of coding but also aware of the rather deep and technical type abstractions and combinatorics which are still hard to grasp for me, I also felt unsure about following the Haskell road. Still clinging on to Haskell because: a) bespoken clearness of code of Haskell I miss too hard when looking on other languages code b) elegance of Parser-Combinators (well this seems not really an argument because they are ported to many other languages, but I also suspect something might be lost, because you do not get the full customizability of functions and operators like in Haskell in other langs) c) stemming from the same Parser-Combinator vein: PANDOC: is there a better text conversion tool, which is so well maintained and so easy (well yes, some knowledge needed -> see learning tipps) to extend d) I don't know much about robust code in other languages, but then again I had so much input by Haskell blogs and tutorials, that the idea that type safety and testing functions in isolation might be a good one has stuck. So although you probably will not interface with a nuclear power plant in your DH coding, I think robustness could be an argument too. So the elegance of code and the safety of the program are very general pro-arguments for Haskell. Text handling capabilities through Parser-Combinators are really handy. Still for text-munging to produce a desired output for D3.js all this might seem overkill and to be honest I wouldn't want to parse tagsoup with Haskell either (but only because I know the benefits of a specialized text-processing-toolbox like TUSTEP [http://www.tustep.uni-tuebingen.de/tustep_eng.html]). On the other hand, if you have a well formed XML there a enough XML-tools for haskell which produce a neat Haskell data structure which in turn you can work at with nice pure functions. Also there are enough possibilities to get these structures out into Javascript (Fay,...). (javascript? I also find elm-lang.org very compelling.) So for now my solution is to have Haskell as an important side-project. I still have to go through the "Write Yourself A Scheme" [1] which is said to give the needed exposure to some abstract types so that one can digest the theory behind those much better, but I hope by then the scariness of the abunding type system will abate a bit more. There's also a new book about data anlysis, which advertises "Recipes for every stage of data analysis, from collection to visualization" [2]. Interfacing with C? At least from my superficial obervance of my cabal installs Foreign.PointerC (or so) is by no means an exception. Don't know about Python, though. Well, anyway good to know, someone has similar worries like me. Good luck! Cheers, René Tobner [1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours [2] http://www.packtpub.com/haskell-data-analysis-cookbook/book On 22.07.2014 14:00, beginners-request@haskell.org wrote:

The question is simple and was raised by many people before, probably everyone who began with another language and at some point got to know Haskell: Should I learn Haskell?