FP for simulation and modelling

I’m about to start a simulation/modelling project. I already know that OOP is used for this kind of projects. However, studying Haskell made me consider using the FP paradigm for modelling a system of components. Let me elaborate:

Why isn’t functional language syntax more close to human language?

I’m interested in functional programming and decided to get head to head with Haskell. My head hurts… but I’ll eventually get it…
I have one curiosity though, why is the syntax so cryptic (in lack of another word)?

How often is seq used in Haskell production code?

I have some experience writing small tools in Haskell and I find it very intuitive to use, especially for writing filters (using interact) that process their standard input and pipe it to standard output.

Is Haskell’s type system formally equivalent to Java’s? [closed]

Closed 9 years ago.

Naming conventions for newtype deconstructors (destructors?)

Looking into Haskell’s standard library we can see:

What’s the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor – to unwrap a value from a data type?

Edit: I’m rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn’t realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different – it’s a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.)

Using foldr to append two lists together (Haskell)

I have been given the following question as part of a college assignment. Due to the module being very short, we are using only a subset of Haskell, without any of the syntactic sugar or idiomatic shortcuts….I must write:

Why doesn’t Haskell have type-level lambda abstractions?

Are there some theoretical reasons for that (like that the type checking or type inference would become undecidable), or practical reasons (too difficult to implement properly)?

Fastest Functional Language

I’ve recently been delving into functional programming especially Haskell and F#, the prior more so. After some googling around I could not find a benchmark comparison of the more prominent functional languages (Scala,F# etc).

Misconceptions about purely functional languages?

I often encounter the following statements / arguments: