Haskell vs. procedural programming in the real world [closed]

Answer 1

You probably shouldn't expect to use Haskell anywhere nearly as often as a C family language in professional settings. If the question is whether it will be valuable for you to study Haskell and functional programming paradigms, the answer is yes. You can apply your enriched understanding of programming to all of your work.

Answer 2

Broadening your horizons helps you be a better programmer no matter what language you happen to be using at the moment. You'll never look at programming the same way after you've written Lisp macros, for instance. After you begin to think in Haskell terms, you'll find yourself composing functions and wishing for closures in less advanced languages.

Judging from goodies in C# such as lambdas, type inference, closures, and so on, learning Haskell will give you a leg up on tomorrow's cutting edge in mainstream languages.

Answer 3

As opposed to procedural languages, will it be valuable for me to study Haskell and functional programming paradigms?

If having an expanded skill set is valuable, then: yes.

One advantage you might pick up: parallel and concurrent programming. Procedural languages of the past tend to have no clear notion of side effects, as a result writing parallel programs in them is difficult to do correctly. Functional languages (in particular, ones that limit side effects like Haskell) have a lot more to say about productive parallel programming.

Having that skill up your sleeve can't hurt.

Answer 4

Some people enjoy programming in Haskell. If you can choose your environment, and enjoyment is a consideration, then maybe you should hop in.

Many programmers are not in position to choose their tools and enjoyment is not a factor for their choices. Many of them get to use C/Java/etc at their workplace for the "core project source", but then also choose or need to use Python for "scripts" such as build-scripts with SCons, other scripts that generate Java/etc code, testing systems, proofs-of-concepts, etc.. And in other places Python is also used in the "core project".

In 8 years, it will be Haskell, not Python, which will be "coming to you". But you can come to it sooner.

Answer 5

You can combine the use of functional programming and be pragmatic about the language.

All modern scripting languages s.a. JavaScript or Lua allow use of the functional paradigm.

Answer 6

If nothing else, the change in mindset that learning Haskell provides will help you when you have to go back to using those procedural languages that still are used in the workplace.

The functional paradigm is beginning to make it's way into various mainstream applications and languages - Even C++ is going to be adding a (crippled) lambda in C++0x.

You may also want to look at some of the hybrid languages like Scala or OCaml. Scala is being used at Twitter, and OCaml is being used at Jane's Street in a financial trading platform.