Ground Up

[Max Kirillov]

Hi!

I'm far not an expert in Haskell, but I'll venture to say
"I'm in". I'm not an CS student and I have never been (I
learned Solid State Physics). I became there in about 6
months without paying a cent.  Well, I paid for dialup. I
also spent a lot of time. My wife should hate Haskell.

I would recommend you not to be confined by Haskell. Take a
look at Lisp, ML. First, it helps to get into concepts
rather than into details of syntax parsing of high-order
polymorphism. I began learning FP with Erlang, and I think
it helped me.

Further, Haskell, though _very_ nice, is probably not "the
best choice" for a "pragmatic programming". It is too alive.
Different compilers are not 100% compatible each to other,
and even different versions of the same compilers may be
incompatible. You should be ready either to stick yourself
and your co-wokers to a certain version of the compiler or
to spend some significal time to keep you programs working
with any compiler.

Maybe you will find that it's better to use Ocaml or
Scheme. Thay have own neats, and seem to be more stable.

Max.

On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 09:41:10PM +0800, Jerry, JiJie wrote:
> Good day everyone, I'm a haskell newbie trying to seeking advice to
> advance myself.
> 
> My backgrounds are:
> * As a non-CS student, I have absolutely no knowledge of lambda calculus
> * And unfortunately I have to make painful decision on spending $30
>   on a book or three days' meal
> 
> While my goals are:
> * Become a pragmatic haskell programmer in the shortest time
> * At the minimal expense
> 
> What I have done for the past few weeks were:
> * I read almost all the free educational sources at www.haskell.org, 
> * Subscribed to this mailing list and try to digest every mail
> * Read most of the "The Haskell School of Expression" (by Paul
>   Hudak) and the non-theoretical chapters of the "An Introduction To
>   Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell" (by AJT Davie), which
>   are the only two introductory level haskell related books in our
>   library
> 
> However, my problems are:
> * I still don't understand most of the codes I found, like the various
>   haskell libraries
> * I still have no clue of most (ok, almost all) of what is being
>   discussed in this mailing list
> 
> So I'm eager to know if there are cost-effective ways to achieve my
> goals or at least leverage myself from the beginner's level. 
> 
> Your advice would be greatly appreciated!
> 
> Regards,
> Jerry
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