[Haskell-cafe] How did you stumble on Haskell?

[Frederick Ross]

On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov <deliverable at gmail.com> wrote:
> How do people stumble on Haskell?

Read Ullman's book on ML.  Look at Haskell at that point, but was
insufficiently mathematically sophisticated to "get it" (hey, I was
sixteen).  Wrote numerical analysis code in Forth for a year or so.
Hacked on a several hundred thousand line FORTRAN 77 codebase.  Wrote
the simulation code for my physics thesis in C.  Decided I never
wanted to instantiate, destroy, or otherwise manage memory ever again.
 Had a hate-hate relationship with MATLAB, decided Mathematica was
rubbish.  Remembered Haskell.  Now creating the programmatic
equivalent of a cyborg, hunchback puppeteer to control a Java image
analysis program in Scheme.

So of course the best work I've done has been completely analytic
mathematical physics without reference to computing of any kind.  And
I'm a biologist.

This is known as being born in the Random monad.

-- 
Frederick Ross
Graduate Fellow, (|Siggia> + |McKinney>)/sqrt(2) Lab
The Rockefeller University
Je ne suis pas Fred Cross!