[Haskell-beginners] Re: Motivation to Learn Haskell

[A Smith]

My  tuppence worth is the wonderful conciseness of programs, the way
abstraction works, it  almost forces you into creating simple very testable
functions. These functions will  have a well defined uncomplicated
transformation, and as such may be re-used to build more complex functions.
As a beginner, the templtation is to resist the temptation to implemrnt
imperative code, but to link functions together in my thinking like a shell
script. With a shell script programs are stated left to right with the
output of the leftmost being fed into the next one to the right. I think
with Haskell on a similar pattern with a pipeline of functions feed from the
right-most one. The next thing is to learn associativity rules and the use
of parenthesis,  and $ operators.
Read everything on www.haskell.org.
Confuse yourself by trying to read Prelude source code!
--
Andrew Edinburgh,Scotland

On 4 September 2010 01:30, Benjamin L. Russell <DekuDekuplex at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Tim Perry <perry2of5 at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> > If you do jump in, I'd recommend the Real World Haskell book or the The
> Haskell
> > School of Expression book.
>
> Another interesting title is _Programming in Haskell,_ by Graham Hutton
> (see http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html<http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/book.html>).
>  Duncan Coutts has
> written a review on the title (see
> http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book-review.pdf<http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/book-review.pdf>
> ).
>
> As for motivation for learning Haskell, one motivator is the purely
> functional nature of the language, which is referentially transparent
> and therefore facilitates reasoning about programs.  Haskell has roots
> in category theory, and therefore, it is frequently possible to use
> category-theoretical reasoning to reason about the correctness of
> programs; this cannot be said of most other programming languages.
>
> -- Benjamin L. Russell
>
> >
> > Good luck,
> > Tim
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----
> > From: Lorenzo Isella <lorenzo.isella at gmail.com>
> > To: beginners at haskell.org
> > Sent: Fri, September 3, 2010 3:57:26 PM
> > Subject: [Haskell-beginners] Motivation to Learn Haskell
> >
> > Dear All,
> > It is my first post to this list and please do not take it as an attempt
> to
> > start any flamewar.
> >>From time to time, I try to find the motivation to learn at least the
> > fundamentals of another programming language.
> > I normally use R and Python on a daily basis (but I am not that much into
> OO
> > programming) and have a good knowledge of Fortran and a rather
> superficial one
> > of C.
> > Beside learning a new language as a sort of mind expanding exercise, I
> try to
> > figure out how and if it can save me some time in my work and how it
> measures up
> > against other languages.
> > These days I tend to rely on R for data analysis and visualization
> whereas I use
> > Python (in particular Numpy+SciPy) for number crunching (it is very
> convenient
> > to use scipy/numpy to solve ODE's, manipulate arrays and so on).
> > Now, I wonder what benefit I would gain from learning Haskell since I
> mainly
> > write codes for numerical simulations/data analysis.
> > I know Haskell is gaining momentum e.g. in the financial environment (I
> happened
> > to see Haskell knowledge as a specification in some quant jobs) hence it
> must be
> > more than suitable for numerical work and, by the little I have
> understood so
> > far, it allows one to write code really resembling mathematical
> expressions (I
> > was impressed by guards and curried functions).
> > However, it also looks to me (correct me if I am mistaken) that Haskell
> is a far
> > cry from the wealth of standard and contributed scientific modules you
> have in
> > Python or R and thanks to which you do not re-implement the wheel
> yourself.
> > Any thoughts/suggestions are really appreciated.
> > Cheers
> >
> > Lorenzo
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Beginners at haskell.org
> > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
> >
>
> --
> Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
> http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
> Translator/Interpreter / Mobile:  +011 81 80-3603-6725
> "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^
>
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