[Haskell-cafe] Re: Solution to Thompson's Exercise 4.4

[Michael Vanier]

> Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 00:01:17 -0800
> From: Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
> Cc: 
> 
> Michael Vanier wrote:
> >>Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 23:39:21 -0800
> >>From: Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
> >>Cc: Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> >>
> >>As an aside, I kept all of the exercises in revision control. So I can 
> >>look back at what I first wrote and my later changes. A habit I plan to 
> >>keep as I move on to other programming texts and languages.
> > 
> > 
> > That's a nice approach.  But I can't resist asking: once you've learned
> > Haskell, what is there left to move on to? ;-)
> > 
> 
> (-:
> 
> I try to learn a new language every other year or so. Lisp and I have 
> butted heads many times. So I thought I would try Haskell -- already 
> love Python and the two are clearly siblings with divorced parents.
> 
> Unfortunately since Haskell is neither C nor Perl, I will probably only 
> dabble in it, much like Python. Not a fact I like, but one that the 
> corporate world keeps making me swallow.
> 

Actually, haskell and python share little except some syntactic
similarities.  But haskell shares a lot with lisp/scheme.  There are some
good books on scheme e.g. SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/~sicp) and "How to
Design Programs" (http://www.htdp.org) which would be very helpful for the
beginning haskell programmer to absorb (you have to learn to walk before
you can write monadic parser combinators ;-)).  OTOH lisp and scheme are
strict languages, like ocaml, unlike haskell, which is lazy.  That makes a
big difference in practice.

As for C or Perl, try using haskell to generate C or Perl and don't tell
your employers where the C/perl code came from ;-)

Even though I'm just a haskell newbie myself, I think it's the most
interesting language around, by a pretty wide margin.

Mike