[Haskell-cafe] Re: Doubting Haskell

[apfelmus]

Alan Carter wrote:
> We now need to be able to do parallel with ease. Functional
> programming just got really important.

While this is a reason to have a look at Haskell, I think it's not the 
best one. In fact, I think it's probably harmful to have parallelism as 
single goal for learning Haskell: the language is very different from 
imperative languages and if you "just want to do parallelism" but 
otherwise stick to what you know, you'll have a really hard time.

> Eventually a 3 page
> introduction on the O'Reilly website together with a good document
> called "Haskell for C Programmers" got me to the point where I could
> access "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial", and I was away... for a bit.

IMHO, the easiest way to learn Haskell and to appreciate functional 
programming is to learn it from a textbook :) The online tutorials are 
nice but you'll have a much harder time with them.

I'd recommend Hutton's "Programming in Haskell" for the basics and 
Bird's "Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell" for the 
functional style. See also

   http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books#Textbooks


Of course, the textbooks (except "Real World Haskll" which is not done 
yet) most likely don't cover the System.IO stuff, but you've got the 
#haskell irc channel and the mailing list for that. So, the textbook 
remark is in anticipation of the questions that you are going to have :) 
(if you decide to pursue Haskell further, that is).


Regards,
apfelmus