The document introduces Haskell as a pure functional programming language. It discusses why functional programming matters, noting that it allows for modularity, has no concept of time, enables easy reasoning about code by just following types, and uses lazy evaluation. It also provides a brief history of Haskell, including the definition of Haskell 1.0 in 1990 and the Haskell 98 and Haskell 2010 standards. The overall document serves as an introduction to Haskell and reasons for learning the programming language.