In about 93 or 94 a colleague had talked to me about this wierd language called Haskell. At the time I hadn't listened because I was sure that Eiffel was the future. Besides, he had showed me a GUI demo: a calculator that took about half a second to register a button click. So I concluded that it wasn't practical. Fast forward to about 2001. I was in a job where I almost never got to do any programming. It had become painfully obvious that Eiffel wasn't going anywhere. I could always learn Java, but after Eiffel downgrading to Java felt like a sell-out: I wasn't going to do it. But I did want to learn a new language, and I'd read Eric Raymond's piece about being a hacker, where he said to learn Lisp for the side effects. I sort-of knew Lisp anyway, having done some Emacs Lisp hacking. But I felt I didn't really get it about FP. There seemed to be a lot of buzz about Haskell, so I took the plunge and started learning. Paul.