[Haskell-cafe] How did you stumble on Haskell?

[Paul Johnson]

  In about 93 or 94 a colleague had talked to me about this wierd 
language called Haskell. At the time I hadn't listened because I was 
sure that Eiffel was the future. Besides, he had showed me a GUI demo: a 
calculator that took about half a second to register a button click. So 
I concluded that it wasn't practical.

Fast forward to about 2001. I was in a job where I almost never got to 
do any programming. It had become painfully obvious that Eiffel wasn't 
going anywhere. I could always learn Java, but after Eiffel downgrading 
to Java felt like a sell-out: I wasn't going to do it. But I did want to 
learn a new language, and I'd read Eric Raymond's piece about being a 
hacker, where he said to learn Lisp for the side effects. I sort-of knew 
Lisp anyway, having done some Emacs Lisp hacking. But I felt I didn't 
really get it about FP. There seemed to be a lot of buzz about Haskell, 
so I took the plunge and started learning.

Paul.