&gt;I see equally smart people enraptured with Haskell. And, maybe it&#x27;s just over my head, but so far no practical advance is apparent.<p>The advantages appear to be limited to highly complex functional code (i.e. big black boxes of code without side effects). IIRC facebook has a spam filter written using it.<p>Since most of the industry involves code where the functional aspect isn&#x27;t all that complex and the side effects are, the practical advances aren&#x27;t all that relevant for a lot of people.<p>Except, perhaps, for the impact Haskell is having on other more mainstream languages&#x27; design.