The Howdy Glossary

Haskell 98 is a widely adopted standard for a statically typed, purely functional programming language known for its key features like type classes, pattern matching, list comprehensions, and monads. Its "lazy evaluation" feature provides extensive expressiveness to developers and facilitates compiler optimizations through advanced transformations on high-level constructs without requiring manual input from programmers. Haskell's development process is structured to ensure stringent standards are met before any updates are incorporated into the official specification.

The language was initially created by researchers including Paul Hudak, Simon Peyton Jones, Philip Wadler, and others in the late 1980s. It has since evolved through community efforts with contributions from the Haskell community and committees towards its development and standardization. Designed as a response to the need for a powerful functional programming language promoting modularity and conciseness in writing complex programs, Haskell embodies strong static typing, higher-order functions, lazy evaluation, and immutability to support functional programming paradigms effectively.

In the realm of functional programming languages, Haskell faces competition from Scala, OCaml, F#, Erlang, and Clojure—all offering unique strengths catering to various domains such as scientific computing (OCaml), fault-tolerant systems (Erlang), concurrent applications (Clojure), or enterprise scalability (Scala). Despite these alternatives' appeal within their specific niches or combined paradigms like Scala’s mix of object-oriented features with Java compatibility or Clojure’s simplicity on JVM infrastructure—Haskell sets itself apart with its strong emphasis on purity in functional programming. Leveraging lazy evaluation alongside an advanced type system fortified by type classes and monads allows developers to create elegant code solutions efficiently while adhering strictly to immutability principles.