Perspectives on learning and using Haskell

[Graham Klyne]

I've spent part of the past few months learning Haskell and developing a 
moderately sized application.  I came to this from a long background (20 
years or so) of "conventional" programming in a variety of languages (from 
Fortran and Algol W to Java and Python).  For me, learning Haskell has been 
one of the steepest learning curves of any new language that I have ever 
learned.  Before this project, I was aware of some aspects of functional 
programming, but had never previously done any "in anger" (i.e. for real).

Throughout this period, I've been accumulating some notes about some things 
that I found challenging along the way.  The notes are not organized in any 
way, and they're certainly not complete.  I've published them on my web 
site [1] in case the perspective might be useful to any "old hands" here.

[1] http://www.ninebynine.org/Software/Learning-Haskell-Notes.html

...

Also on the topic of perspectives:

In recent conversation with a colleague, he mentioned to me that the term 
"functional programming" has an image problem.  He suggested that the term 
conveys an impression of an approach that is staid, non-progressive or 
lacking novelty, and is prone to elicit a response of "been there, done 
that" from programmers who don't realize the full significance of the term 
"functional".  I've also noticed that when I talk about "functional 
programming", some people tend to think I'm talking about using techniques 
like functions in C or Pascal (which is course is very desirable, but old 
hat and not worthy of great excitement).

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
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