[Haskell-cafe] Haskell overview

[ATWOOD,JOHN (HP-Corvallis,ex1)]

> A colleague with a mathematics and Lisp background is wanting to learn
> more about Haskell. The books he's looked at concentrate more on building
> up from the basics and getting the syntax right, etc., whereas really he's
> looking more of a top-down view that makes Haskell's features and behavior
> clear and relates them to category theory, etc. Would anyone be able to
> suggest some good references?
>
>-- Mark


For lispers, I like to point out this sentence of section 6.4 of the Haskell
98 Report:
	Haskell provides several kinds of numbers; the numeric types and
	the operations upon them have been heavily influenced by Common 
	Lisp and Scheme.

For mathematicians, I'd recommend the first 5 pages of:
Calculating Functional Programs, Jeremy Gibbons, 2002
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/jeremy.gibbons/publications/index.html#
calculating    Then I'd mention the Acid Rain Theorem, Fusion Theorem,
Wadler's _Theorems for Free!_.  When I'd show some exemplary fp programs:

Bridging the Algorithm Gap: A Linear-Time Functional Program for Paragraph
Formatting.  Oege de Moor and Jeremy Gibbons, 1999
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/jeremy.gibbons/publications/index.html#
para

Financial Contracts: An Adventure in Financial Engineering, 2000 Simon
Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, and Julian Seward
http://www.lexifi.com/resources.html#paper

Functional Specification of JPEG Decompression, and an Implementation for
Free, Jeroen Fokker, 1995 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/72092.html

Modeling Web Interactions, Paul Graunke, Robert Bruce Findler, Shriram
Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, 2003
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/graunke03modeling.html

Haskell Server Pages Functional Programming and the Battle for the Middle
Tier, Erik Meijer, Dannyy van Velzen, 2000
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/318262.html

Writing High-Performance Server Applications in Haskell, Case Study: A
Haskell Web Server, Simon Marlow, 2000
http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/bib.html (about the 4th one down)

And then, the more introductory material:

Why Functional Programming Matters, John Hughes
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html
and here's a summary of the paper:
  http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~j-hamer/360/why-fp-matters.html

Section 3.1.3 of SICP:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Why no one uses functional languages, Philip Wadler, 1998
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/wadler98why.html

here's an old, but still relevant summary of some issues keeping fp from
taking over the world:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~zorn/cs5535/Fall-1997/haskell-summary.html

Some general links:
http://haskell.readscheme.org/
http://www.haskell.org


Hope this isn't too overwhelming, but it was an opportunity for me to gather
my thoughts.

Enjoy,

John Atwood