This month Hakim Cassimally is presenting on why "Haskell is an acceptable Perl".  We're meeting on Monday in madlab at the normal time of 7pm... 

So, Haskell is "an advanced purely-functional programming language" which supports writing "declarative, statically typed code". It may be optimized for academic buzzwords you've never heard of but... is it any good for writing code in the way that you'd write Perl, Python, or Ruby?

What are strong types, and why are we so frightened of them anyway? Can you develop interactively in  Haskell, the way you would in a dynamic language?

Does Haskell have "whipuptitude" (being able to get things done quickly) as well as "manipulexity" (being able to manipulate complex things)? And perhaps most importantly, can writing Haskell be *fun*?

Haskell is founded on decades of the finest mathematical and computer science research.  Perl, quite demonstrably isn't... but why do so many Perl programmers also love Haskell?

Audrey Tang wrote the first prototype for Perl 6, Pugs, in Haskell, and coined the phrase "lambdacamel" for the substantial crossover between the languages.

What does a Perl programmer make of Haskell?  What are the lessons that can be learned (in either direction).  And do the languages have more in common than you might have thought?