Is there a "Why Haskell?" post somewhere out there? I am just curious about what Haskell brings to the table, what it is good at, and does it have a niche. Is Haskell trying to break its bonds in the niche to get to the wider world in general? All sorts of questions like that.
The big things that Haskell does that no-one[1] else does are a) strict separation of the parts of the program that do I/O or otherwise change some sort of global state and b) lazy evaluation, which means evaluate a function only when it is needed to do (a). The compiler enforces (a).
(a) is a big deal because it makes it very easy to reason about what your program does, which is handy because (b) is the opposite :-) but makes certain kinds of computations very elegant to express.
