[Haskell-beginners] PHP vs Haskell... a challenge!

[Sean Charles]

Thank you everybody for your responses, I am going to print them out and 
study them hard, particularly the use of left folds. I think I skipped 
that in RWH book... .I need to go back and re-cover the basic again I 
think... it's a tendency of mine to graze through stuff picking up what 
I need and sometimes you just can't beat learning the basics.

As a still beginner after about eight months of (somewhat intermittent) 
usage I would say that in order to truly get to grips with Haskell as a 
concept let alone a language you need to know and understand ...

* currying, which helped me to truly understand the signature notation 
used, a -> b -> c etc. I have used haXe, which is written in ocaml, and 
the notation is the same but now makes more sense!

* function composition leading to point-less notation, this is better 
understood the currying penny has dropped

* lazy versus strict evaluation and the concept of lazy I/O and why it 
can sometimes leave you scratching your head for a while!! LMAO! :)

* monads: of course, for me the best video I've seen is this one.


As a reluctant Drupal/PHP developer and wannabe FP developer for about 
six years now, each time I find myself coding some rubbish or other in 
PHP I have lots of 'ahah!' moments as I think that it would be nice to 
be able to express some idiom or form more succinctly in PHP and then I 
realise what X Y or Z is for in Haskell... that's the upside, the 
downside is I then have to continue the job in PHP!


Thanks again,
Sean.