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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related, perhaps the most spectacular story of a late coder I've ever heard is that of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pruteanu (somewhat controversial Romanian literary critic and politician).

Basically, despite having a major in Romanian literature and spending a lifetime as a literary critic, with almost 0 contact with computers, he decided in his late 40s and early 50s to understand the things behind the internet.

So he picked up on his own: PC usage, internet browsing, PHP and MySQL coding, enough to make his own website and a few apps. That, starting from a point where he could barely use a mouse.

When asked during a TV show how he did it, he replied:

Like I did things for my literary criticism: I read an 1 meter [high stack] of books about the subject.

Every time I need motivation I think about that quote :)

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>I read an 1 meter [high stack] of books about the subject.

Sounds like a good hook for website. Instead of learn X in 21 days: http://www.1meterofbooks/programming

That unit of measurement should be dubbed the Pruteanu

As in:

"How many Pruteanus until I'll be proficient in ML if I have zero understanding of the subject"

So shall it be!

1 Pruteanus (1 Prt) is measured as the amount of learning from a 1m high stack of any books given.

obv /s

You could use some standard figures for page and book size (in Kb) and measure Pruteanus in megabytes of text. And you joke, but there's nothing in particular that is required of a unit of measure other than a lot of people thinking it's a good idea.

Should also consider an information density:

This book may look small, but has about .125 Prt in its pages!

Golden!

Given you can get the dimensions of particular books off their Amazon description; looks like it could certainly be done!

Domain just sold. Interesting.

on the topic of book learning, is there some generally considered principal choice when it comes to learning Haskell? There seem to be some competing ones with widely varying opinion.

There are indeed a lot of competing ones. Highly recommended:

• CIS 194 @ UPenn, https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/

• Haskell Programming from first principles, http://haskellbook.com/

• Real World Haskell, http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

RWH is great up to Chapter 4 at which point the wheels come off. LYAH is much better.

Learning Haskell by reading the most influential papers is also a good approach.

https://hackwithlambda.github.io/reading-group/

Not to be rude, but that sounds like a horrible introduction to a language for a beginner.

If you're intermediate and want to gain more insights sure. But if you don't even know the syntax it seems like an extremely inefficient way of learning any language.

The first papers in the list explain the "why" of functional programming, and later on more concrete Haskell topics are covered. Papers shouldn't be the only resource but you can supplement them with tutorials and skimming Real World Haskell. This approach of reading papers is intended to be holistic, of course you won't be churning out Haskell code within a couple days, but when learning Haskell or FP, syntax shouldn't be one of the primary focuses imo. Unless you're learning lisp.

Depends on your background of course, but Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been pretty influential as a first look at Haskell. Read it with a REPL open.

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

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