Haskell is a pure functional programming language that was created in 1987 by a committee of researchers. It features lazy evaluation, pattern matching, list comprehensions, and type polymorphism. Haskell does not use variables or loops, instead relying on recursion. It has evolved over time from Haskell 1.0 to the current Haskell 2010 standard. For beginners, Hugs is a good starting point, while Haskell Platform is recommended for developers.