Following up _delirium's post, there are advantages to the Haskell approach: separating structure from interpretation of computer programs (pun very much intended) and compositionality of said programs. I talked a bit about this first property in the context of the free monad here: http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/04/14/free-monads-are-s...

It is certainly worth exploring other paradigms to understand the advantages and disadvantages they bring.