One blogpost style which I find almost completely useless is “I tried Programming Language X for 5 days and here’s how it was.” Most of the time, the first impression is superficial discussing syntax and whether you could get Hello World to run.

This blogpost is I tried Haskell for 5 years and here’s how it was.

In the last few years, I have been (with others) developing ngless, a domain specific language and interpreter for next-generation sequencing. For partly accidental reasons, the interpreter is written in Haskell. Even though I kept using other languages (most Python and C++), I have now used Haskell quite extensively for a serious, medium-sized project (11,270 lines of code). Here are some scattered notes on Haskell:

There is a learning curve

Haskell is a different type of language. It takes a while to fully get used to it if you’re coming from…