[Haskell-cafe] Learning Haskell

[Mark T.B. Carroll]

Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin at cableone.net> writes:
(snip)
> I have been perusing the haskell.org site and reading some of the
> tutorials. I just didn't want to expend lots of time just to find out
> that my math skills were woefully inadequate. I am grateful to learn
(snip)

Right. My math background isn't good enough for me to understand
(without much effort) some of the list traffic here - there's a lot I'm
still wrapping my head around. With much of the Haskell I've figured
out, I've done so by studying examples of others' code. Still, the
Haskell I do know is more than enough for me to do plenty of things
with, and it certainly covers everything I'd normally have coming to
mind from my use of other languages.

> The reason I asked about programming in the small, was my desire to
> spend my time and energy in a single direction. The ability to move what
> I do in Python to Haskell aids in that goal. It also promotes my
(snip)

Yes. I've ported a number of little Perl and bash scripts to Haskell
with very pleasing results. (Most recently, a little script that does
AUTHINFO GENERIC authentication by MD5 to an NNTP server.) It's even
quite easy to slap together little one-off programs once you're
comfortable with using "do" and the IO monad (which is pretty easy for
single-threaded stuff, and forkProcess works nicely too IMLE).

-- Mark