I’ve been learning the Haskell programming language for a project at work. I’ve always been a little intimidated by its reputation, and not without reason. Idiomatic Haskell is like the second discourse of the Buddha: easy to understand when someone explains it, but hard to grok well enough to write yourself. I’ve enjoyed the challenge, however, and it’s given me insight into other languages and tools I use: many features of Scala, functional effects libraries, and list comprehensions (one of my favorite features of Python), among other things.