Perspectives on learning and using Haskell

[Marc A. Ziegert]

> In recent conversation with a colleague, he mentioned to me that the term 
> "functional programming" has an image problem.  He suggested that the term 

short komment:
"meta programming" and "meta-language" makes people curious, "functional programming" seems to have the opposite effect.

merry xmas
- marc

Am Dienstag, 23. Dezember 2003 18:26 schrieb 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
> For email:
> http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell mailing list
> Haskell at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
> 
>