@2ck I find haskell to be the funnest language to work in.. I do not find it to be particularly productive, however, since it has far fewer libraries and support than other languages. So that means any projects i do in it get limited contributors and have a limited collection of libraries. Ultimately this makes it a less productive language for me and often rules it out as an option for new projects even when I would love to use it.
@2ck The IO aspect of haskell is a bit of a nightmare as you say. I think its the most annoying part for newcomers. It is the consequence of wanting a pure functional language and the reason why almost every functional language out there is not pure, most people feel the barrier isnt worth it.
It really just depends on what your doing if it has value or not I guess, but many would argue that the IO stuff is haskells biggest shortcoming.
@freemo Oh, it's a kind of fun, and the fact that I have to slow down so much is evidence that I'm learning, but I worry that the kinds of questions I want to ask and the answers to them are just evidence that "I'm thinking about things the wrong way" and you "just don't do that in Haskell". I've sort-of gotten over that doing pretty basic stuff with IO requires using an abstruse mathematical concept, but it's frustrating that I have to jump through hoops in this type system to do what I want while I still don't feel I'm getting much out of that system (other than the intellectual challenge).