Hello, Haskell Cafe folks.

My programming life (which has started about 3-4 years ago) has always been in the functional paradigm. Eventually, I had to program in Pascal and Prolog for my University (where I learned Haskell). I also did some PHP, SQL and HTML while building some web sites, languages that I taught to myself. I have never had any contact with JavaScript though.

But all these languages were in my life as secondary languages, being Haskell my predominant preference. Haskell was the first programming language I learned, and subsequent languages never seemed so natural and worthwhile to me. In fact, every time I had to use another language, I created a combinator library in Haskell to write it (this was the reason that brought me to start with the HaTeX library). Of course, this practice wasn't always the best approach.

But, why I am writing this to you, haskellers?

Well, my curiosity is bringing me to learn a new general purpose programming language. Haskellers are frequently comparing Object-Oriented languages with Haskell itself, but I have never programmed in any OO-language! (perhaps this is an uncommon case) I thought it could be good to me (as a programmer) to learn C/C++. Many interesting courses (most of them) use these languages and I feel like limited for being a Haskell programmer. It looks like I have to learn imperative programming (with side effects all over around) in some point of my programming life.

So my questions for you all are:

* Is it really worthwhile for me to learn OO-programming?

* If so, where should I start? There are plenty of "functional programming for OO programmers" but I have never seen "OO programming for functional programmers".

* Is it true that learning other programming languages leads to a better use of your favorite programming language?

* Will I learn new programming strategies that I can use back in the Haskell world?

Thanks in advance for your kind responses,
Daniel Díaz.