Lisp and Haskell (2017)
My problem with Haskell is that it is not pragmatic and the reason I stopped using it. The philosophy of separating pure and impure code – and to enforce it – does more harm than good. Often its difficult to understand what your "forth level of abstraction code" above the usual abstraction levels really does. Haskell is fun to learn. Haskell has a lot of interesting concepts to explore and it will make you a better programmer. Haskell code can be really dense. And Haskell code can be totally unreadable, using concepts which take weeks to learn – which is... not so great.<p>Lisp (Common Lisp) is what you get when you reduce the rules and syntax to a minimum and try at the same time to be a maximal flexible programming language. This simplicity and applied pragmatism is what makes it so great. Like the authors in the Lisp books warned, after learning Lisp, coding won't be the same. Now I see everywhere code that could easily be written in Lisp, but is not so great in language XYZ. All those SDL's and stringified API's and code-generators they need to do real things and data formats like JSON... all obsolete, if they would have chosen Lisp (or a language with brackets and Lisp like evaluation rules).<p>The other thing that is often overlooked regarding Lisp is, that in a Lisp like language there is no need to wait for a new version of the programming language to be released to get new syntax – you can simply add it yourself (or have a library doing it for you). E.g. a lot of the JavaScript mess could be fixed by code transformation, if they would have chosen a Lisp like syntax in the first place.<p>I don't see Haskell as uber language. If I want super correct code, speed and I'm okay with using a more complex language, then there is Rust – which is probably more correct than Haskell and faster, too.<p>Haskell, Lisp and C++ would really benefit form a std library 2.0 and a default package manager... one can dream.