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Was wondering if anyone here has been able to play around with http://haskell.org/ and what you all think of it - for me it is my language of choice for most of my university work & research, and it has given me a totally different view of programming and how software works, to the point that I almost feel dirty every time I use pointers in my C++ code (see http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base ... Maybe.html).

EDIT:
While I was thinking of Haskell in general when posting this, guess the question should extend to functional programming in general...

Haskell is a nice language, but in reality I only use functional languages in specific domains when I feel that the problem is best described by the flow of data, such as procedural problems and the transformation of data. I generally don't like to use it for logic/loops/implementing data structures, but maybe I'm just being biased from being more familiar and comfortable with other programming paradigms.

Haskell's biggest problem is that it is both a purist and an isolationist language. You can't really mix and match it with other languages in practice. Especially comparing a content-oriented language to a primarily management-oriented language that is C++ feels like having to take the atheist to mass.

Most programming tasks consists of a combination of things Haskell excels at and things Haskell sucks at. And since fixing the latter is a big problem, the net result sadly is to drop Haskell altogether, and I haven't written any Haskell in the past 6 years apart from posting the obvious examples that I once did use it.

Fortunately, time's catching up with C-based languages, and you have a growing assortment of languages that try to combine the best of both worlds. Rust and Swift come to mind here.

Its useful to separate out Haskell from Functional Programming in general.

I use FP wherever possible, even though I am doing so in Java, Python, C, C++ and even Javascript programs.

John Carmack has an excellent article and various talks online on this http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/I ... g_in_C.php

(In industry, you rarely get to pick the language. If I could pick, I'd still shy away from Haskell and the Lisps and, eh, I guess Forth).