I generally don't like Haskell, but the view of non-Haskellers (myself included) regarding state does remind me a bit of resisting structured programming because gotos are easier to program.
That's a good analogy and I like it! If someone is really used to simply using goto for all kinds of flow control purposes, there could be some resistance if there's a coding style guide that enforces using if/else/while/do and such. It reminds me of similar arguments about recursion is too powerful in Haskell and similar languages and good style means using map/filter/foldr and the like; or the argument that call-with-current-continuation is too powerful. When a single tool is too powerful, it can be used for a large number of purposes so it ends up being the code reader's job to figure out which purpose the code writer has intended.
Good question. I haven't revisited it in over 10 years. I think it was just too much "new" stuff to learn at once, making it feel too difficult to do anything in it at the time, especially considering I wasn't learning it full time.
Maybe now that I'm older and wiser (debatable) a revisit is in order, but lately I prefer dynamically typed languages (like Clojure and Elixir) to statically typed ones. I'll probably add it to my TODO list, but the list is long and time is short.
Well if you like Clojure you probably also appreciate how it doesn't just give you mutable variables everywhere but instead gives you different tools for different purposes. You have transients, atoms, agents, volatiles etc for different use cases.
