[Haskell-cafe] Object Oriented programming for Functional Programmers

[Daniel Díaz Casanueva]

Hello, Haskell Cafe folks.

My programming life (which has started about 3-4 years ago) has always been
in the functional paradigm. Eventually, I had to program in Pascal and
Prolog for my University (where I learned Haskell). I also did some PHP,
SQL and HTML while building some web sites, languages that I taught to
myself. I have never had any contact with JavaScript though.

But all these languages were in my life as secondary languages, being
Haskell my predominant preference. Haskell was the first programming
language I learned, and subsequent languages never seemed so natural and
worthwhile to me. In fact, every time I had to use another language, I
created a combinator library in Haskell to write it (this was the reason
that brought me to start with the HaTeX library). Of course, this practice
wasn't always the best approach.

But, why I am writing this to you, haskellers?

Well, my curiosity is bringing me to learn a new general purpose
programming language. Haskellers are frequently comparing Object-Oriented
languages with Haskell itself, but I have never programmed in any
OO-language! (perhaps this is an uncommon case) I thought it could be good
to me (as a programmer) to learn C/C++. Many interesting courses (most of
them) use these languages and I feel like limited for being a Haskell
programmer. It looks like I have to learn imperative programming (with side
effects all over around) in some point of my programming life.

So my questions for you all are:

* Is it really worthwhile for me to learn OO-programming?

* If so, where should I start? There are plenty of "functional programming
for OO programmers" but I have never seen "OO programming for functional
programmers".

* Is it true that learning other programming languages leads to a better
use of your favorite programming language?

* Will I learn new programming strategies that I can use back in the
Haskell world?

Thanks in advance for your kind responses,
Daniel Díaz.
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