[Haskell-cafe] Learning Haskell

[Ketil Malde]

"Tom.Amundsen" <tomamundsen at gmail.com> writes:

> How long did it take you to become proficient in Haskell? 

Ten years and still working on it.

> By that, I mean - how long until you were just as comfortable with
> Haskell as you were with your strongest language at that time?

Hm, I'm tempted to rephrase that question as how long before I'd
forgotten enough C++...

Seriously, learning to think functionally wasn't so hard, and I was
relatively quickly able to write useful programs.  The challenge with
Haskell is that it is very open-ended, there are so many constructs
and paradigms that you feel you should learn, but which require a lot
of effort first to understand, and even more so to internalize into
your programming-fu.

When I left C++, the debates were mostly around diagrams and what
shape boxes and arrows representing different concepts should
have. Now its all comonads and endofunctors and hylomorphisms.

(Thankfully, it's possible to ignore topics in any language :-)

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants