Hacker News Reader

Amazing, thanks! It always amazes me how natural Haskell is for some people. Some seem to see the simplest solution with so little effort while I still struggle with almost embarrassingly simple things. I wish I would have picked up Haskell as my first language, instead my mind was poisoned by C...

View on HN

I haven't figured out whether the C I learned was poison. I often wish I could intuit Haskell without translating everything to imperative in my head, because of how cleanly many complex things can be expressed. On the other hand, pretty much everything I program has some rough kind of performance constraint in practice and I appreciate how directly I can read the performance characteristics of an imperative program from its control flow.

Definitely learning Haskell as the first language can make it easier to get used to things, but I don't generally agree with C as "poisonous" to one's mind. My last big project written in C was writing a hypervisor, and honestly using C in this context is rather appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com