[Haskell-beginners] Need advice on R vs Haskell

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

Hello there,

my experience is that most people who don't take Haskell seriously as a
programming language won't really learn to use it for real applications.
Even though you will learn to solve fractions of problems in more
elegant ways in other languages, you will likely miss the big picture.
In some cases your Haskell knowledge may even get in your way [1].

Now this is a generalization, which may not be true in your case.  In
fact your knowledge of other languages will be more likely to get in
your way in Haskell, because it is very easy to adopt imperative
thinking, while it is more involved to adopt Haskell thinking (which is
not simply functional thinking) especially when you are an imperative
thinker.

In any case, you might be able to contribute to existing packages soon,
because usually one of the first things you learn in Haskell is to write
pure, elegant algorithms.  This is certainly valuable for math packages.


Greets,
Ertugrul


[1]: <http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/
      why-learning-haskell-python-makes-you-a-worse-programmer/>


haskell heath <haskell.heath at gmail.com> wrote:

> I should also mention I've been through node.js's tutorials, and I've
> briefly dabbled in Ruby. Is it far-fetched to think I can be just as
> productive in Haskell as opposed to using stuff I already know? Just trying
> to decide if it's worth continuing my learning experience. One alternative
> I've considered is to take it slow with Haskell, and use it more for
> educational purposes for now, and use it when I feel comfortable. Read
> through one section of LYAH/week, one section of the R tutorial/day, and
> work on one project euler problem each week.
> 
> Then again if it's just for educational purposes, I could even throw in the
> SICP videos when, but I'm not sure how practical that is either.
> 
> On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 11:52 PM, haskell heath <haskell.heath at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
> > I'm new to Haskell and I can't really call myself a decent programmer in
> > any other language. Do you think it's wrong to think that I can contribute
> > to the statistics library? I can't decide if I'm being pragmatic for me to
> > learn Haskell and contribute to the statistics library in hopes of being as
> > productive as I would be in learning R. I'm wanting to write a scraper and
> > analyze that data, and I figure this is what the statistics module can be
> > used for. The other alternative to Haskell and R, is to use something like
> > node.js for scraping, js's regex for filtering, and analyzing the resulting
> > data with RPy.
> >
> > Here's a brief overview of my programming exp:
> > Python:
> > - How to Think Like a Computer Scientist using Python
> > - official tutorial
> > - official reference material
> > - a few project euler problems
> >
> > Javascript
> > - all of the Mozilla docs
> >
> > Haskell
> > - started with the RWH, switched to 98' Report, switched over to Yet
> > Another Haskell Tutorial, switched to Gentle Intro, and finally switched to
> > Learn You a Haskell and I'm on the seventh chapter now. I'm considering
> > switching yet again to A Gentle Intro, because it's been months now, and I
> > just want to finish one of these, and that seems to be quickest route.
> >
> > Other
> > - I have briefly learned about C and C++, I start an intro to C++
> > programming next semester.
> >
> > Thank you for your help.
> >
> 


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