Ah, funny thing: I worked with Haskell professionally for a while. I even enjoy the laziness.
My biggest gripe with it is not so much the language itself but the culture: it favours bloated and pompous solutions much in the same way Java/Spring does. Monad Lifting, Lenses, Aspects and FactoryFactories occupy the same space in my head.
I guess I just prefer both the simple side of functional and the simple side of imperative.
OCaml/Standard ML are both pretty nice because you can still use mutation, and the languages are significantly simpler than Haskell.
My only gripe with them is that there seems to be a culture of having zero type annotations (due to HM), which can make reading other people's code difficult.
> the languages are significantly simpler than Haskell
I don't think that's quite true.
Ocaml has plenty of advanced features (the module system, GADT, structural typing in the object system) but the community relationship with them is very different than how the Haskell community uses the language. For the most part, the Ocaml community tends to dislike gratuitous complexity and be non dogmatic (I fondly remember a lens library announcement on which the top comment could be boiled down to "just use mutations").
> My only gripe with them is that there seems to be a culture of having zero type annotations (due to HM), which can make reading other people's code difficult.
Interfaces tend to be annotated (mli files) but usually people rely on the tooling to know types inside files. Merlin is a blessing. It is a very fast type-checker which keeps working on incorrect files.
You’d probably like Erlang. Functional but pragmatic, an imperative core with immutability, native concurrency...it was my introduction to FP and I hope to get another shot at working with it professionally.
Yeah! Actually Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang was my true introduction to FP, got the book when it was released. Lovely language, a shame I never found an opportunity to use it after that.
My biggest gripe with it is not so much the language itself but the culture: it favours bloated and pompous solutions much in the same way Java/Spring does. Monad Lifting, Lenses, Aspects and FactoryFactories occupy the same space in my head.
I guess I just prefer both the simple side of functional and the simple side of imperative.
I definitely have to give OCaml a try.