It's the purity that's the challenge; you can basically construct your types just as accurate or inaccurate as you want. But purity forces you to understand a couple of things first, in order to be productive (eg. monads, monad transformers, type classes).
In my view, Haskell is in the opposite spectrum of Rust when it comes to performance over abstraction. Haskell abstracts everything away, and only manages to get good performance because of purity (I would argue), while Rust wants to be close to the metal, preferring performance over abstraction (e.g. with zero cost abstractions).
"In my view, Haskell is in the opposite spectrum of Rust when it comes to performance over abstraction."
That is why I suggested it. It's a different "hair shirt" than Haskell, but it's one that's a lot easier to explain the benefits of.
Re:Exploratory Haskell (2015)
by coolsunglasses on Saturday November 19, 2016 @01:34PM
(#12994826)
Rust won't help much with Haskell.
I hypothesize that if you're still interested in Haskell after that that you may find it easier to learn. Don't know if many people have walked that path, though.