The refreshing part about Haskell to me is that it is declarative. It feels more natural to describe what you want to happen than to try to think like a machine and compose sequential machine instructions for it each of which can fail at any execution.

Haskell's compiler is incredibly strict. It'll guide you until the code is near bullet proof. The outcome is that the surface area where things can go wrong is relatively a lot smaller than in just about any other language our there.