Why is Haskell so popular among hobby projects?

I should also add. A better real world alternative which has had some good real world use, and one that I think offers advantages for the server side is Erlang. Erlang became hipster cool around 2008 I believe, but the hype was short lived, and the hipsters went away. Elixir, which is built on top of the Erlang runtime system, might be nice (I haven't had a proper look at it), but it could go hipster soon.

no you shouldn't.

there. see what i did just now?

At least at my university, it's taught in Programming 1 alongside Java and Prolog.

Damn this bait is strong.
I agree it's a meme language, but learning it to a sufficient level will definitely teach you ways of thinking that will make you a better programmer. Same with Lisp. Hell, probably even Forth, but that is too much for me.

Exposimg yourself to different ways to doing the same things inevitably will teach you.

Yeah, you acted like a dumb nigger.

That was the case for me, then we used it in a compiler construction class.

That's not a bad university, except for Java. I guess they have to take into account that most people will just end up working as code monkeys.

They really love covering OOP and is suppose Java is a good language to teach it with. You can start with the concepts right away instead of learning memory management first. Later on they cover C++ and VHDL.

lol universities

In Java there are none of those practical things. There is a separate subject about boolean algebra, binary arithmetic and electrical engineering that runs in parallel to Prog 1. It makes sense that you get to know pointers after you know how computers store bytes in memory, not before.

It's a fun language to use, and you really have to learn, and reason well, to do things in it. It is however used in quite a few projects. Those that come to mind are XMonad, Facebook's spam filter, Pandoc and git-annex. Though there's certainly more.

It's also quite excellent for code generation, and has been used to write assembly for NES, and is a popular EDSL host for that very reason.