learn haskell

I wanna learn haskell this summer.

And the way to do it at the moment is to learn about Functional Programming. I feel that imperative languages can’t teach me anything really ground-breaking anymore: they’re all more or less the same. I’m still not completely sure whether to learn Haskell or OCaml though..

I’ll learn some other languages first. I know vb.net and I’m learning Java. I don’t thinknow is the best time to do it.

http://lisperati.com/haskell/

I can’t say that I fully understand monads yet. I tried reading in numbers from a text file a couple different ways; the first time my program crashed when it ran out of heap space, but I rewrote to take less memory (it also ended up faster).

Slowly adjusting to where to put brackets (rather different from C/Perl).

The discipline required to write everything in functions without side-effects is helpful. I’d like to write Perl code more like Haskell code …

Also wrote a mini-version of JUnit in Haskell, though it seems to evaluate every test twice.

I started journey to learn haskell wi th yet another haskell tutorial and Haskell school of expression! Thats great exeperience :)

This language is plain crazy! It’s very hard to learn.

I’ll stick with Python for now. I don’t have that much free time anyway—and my other goals are more important I guess.

I was over at my Haskell buddy Olav’s, and he talked Haskell with me for a couple hours.

His definition of monads was very good, at least to growing my understanding: “They implement the imperative programming paradigm that is going to be used in the imperative parts of your program.”

We looked at the List monad, the IO monad, and also some random-number generation stuff. He had done a Markov chain maker, which we ran on some text. Pretty neat: the thing that took up most of the code was getting a new Random number each time you entered the Random monad (is there one of those?).

The Markov chain program used “take 50” from an infinite list. Infinite lists, they seem to be a staple of functional style. How do you use them?

I’m now wondering if I should really pick Haskell as my next programming language in my skillset. I already know and professionally used C++, Java, C, C#, Python, Ruby. Now I’d like to discover a FP language for a change and I’m hesitating between Haskell and Erlang.
I could even consider F# (or C# 3.0 ?) if it weren’t for the fact that I have no Windows machine at the moment.

They say that you don’t understand something until you can explain it. So I wrote an article about understanding monads via Python list comprehensions . I submitted it to http://programming.reddit.com, and got some very nice feedback, so I was pretty pleased.