1. It is very terse/expressive. I can look at code I haven't touched in 6 months and still understand what it's doing. Perhaps because my code is newbie code and thus somewhat simple.
2. It is the only language that brings me back to the days of Turbo Pascal when the joy of coding came from coding itself, not from building cool things. A small but vital distinction.
That said, I rarely get to use Haskell. For most of my tasks javascript is better suited, but haskell has affected how I write javascript to a great extent.
Maybe it is because I'm not a Haskell Guru, but although I love Haskell's terseness, it tends to make it very hard for me to read code I've written a while ago. I tend to get excited about cool Haskell features like Arrows, using them whenever I can, then I forget about them, and when I read my code 6 months later, it's like gibberish..
When I find myself using arrows, usually I realise that I got lazy and used tuples because my data model wasn’t good enough. Good code flows from good data.
But really, you should use the “tricks” when they make your code more expressive, not just because they’re cool. It’s the same in any language.
You have expressed something I have been worrying about with all these new APIs and frameworks - there is a joy to coding not necessarily connected to delivering business value.
Joy is relative. What gives one person Joy might not give another joy. There just might be people who derive joy using frameworks to deliver business value who might not find joy in coding just for coding sake. For some programming is there hobby and doubles as work, so they derive joy in coding for coding sake. For other's coding is just a means to an end in their work and they have other hobbies.
So every man to what gives him joy and no need to worry about those using Api's and framework to deliver value and pay bills.
1. It is very terse/expressive. I can look at code I haven't touched in 6 months and still understand what it's doing. Perhaps because my code is newbie code and thus somewhat simple.
2. It is the only language that brings me back to the days of Turbo Pascal when the joy of coding came from coding itself, not from building cool things. A small but vital distinction.
That said, I rarely get to use Haskell. For most of my tasks javascript is better suited, but haskell has affected how I write javascript to a great extent.