Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language. The name Haskell derives from the logician Haskell Curry, and the language is the successor to the Miranda programming language.
Haskell introduces some unique features, such as heavy use of monads and support for type classes. Monad authoring is supported by syntactic sugar to make them easier to write, but despite this the language is criticized by some as being too difficult.