[Haskell-cafe] Very freaky

Jim Burton jim at sdf-eu.org
Tue Jul 10 18:27:54 EDT 2007



Andrew Coppin wrote:
> 
> 
> On the one hand, it feels exciting to be around a programming language 
> where there are deep theoretical discoveries and new design territories 
> to be explored. (Compared to Haskell, the whole C / C++ / Java / 
> JavaScript / Delphi / VisualBasic / Perl / Python thing seems so boring.)
> 
> On the other hand... WHAT THE HECK DOES ALL THAT TEXT *MEAN*?! >_<
> 
> 
I agree, it's exciting to use Haskell because of its theoretical
underpinning and the sense of it as a lab for PL ideas. The cost of taking
part in that (even as an observer) is the background knowledge and common
vocabulary you need in order to make sense of a lot of the papers that you
may get referred to, presuming you start asking the kind of questions that
elicit answers like that. I don't think the amount of background knowledge
required is actually that big but if it's missing you will feel like you're
going one step forwards and two steps back. 

The "Getting Started" thread on Lambda the Ultimate is good  - maybe we need
a wikipage like that but of links to sources of the type theoretical
background to Haskell (is there one already? I see "Research Papers", which
obviously has a different purpose). 

I don't know where the best place to start would be but, as I said in
another thread Andrew, TAPL is great. Re. Curry-Howard, have a look Simon
Thompson's book (online for free)
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TTFP/  . Not quick reads (by any
means!), but depending on your learning style, better value than asking ad
hoc questions and joining the dots via blog posts/wiki pages etc.

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