Hacker News Reader

Comment by chuhnk | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone else just read this and realised they need to go off an learn some form of functional programming? I ignored it for such a long time because I felt it wasn't relevant to my current situation but I was wrong. You gain some incredible fundamental knowledge that you would otherwise be completely oblivious to.

Is lisp really the way to go though?

View on HN

I would recommend Haskell over Lisp, because Haskell will force you to do functional programming, where-as Lisp is less rigid in that regard. In addition the #haskell IRC channel on FreeNode is filled with people who have infinite patience with Haskell newbies and it has an excellent introductory text at http://learnyouahaskell.com/

About two years ago I decided to learn Haskell. Had about 4 false starts and didn't "get" it until my 5th attempt, at which point I figured out what the type system meant and had a bit of a Matrix "I know kung fu!"-moment. Two years of hanging around in #haskell later, I know a billion more things about programming/programming languages and learned type theory (although I still don't grok all conversations there :p).

Some other comments on the usefulness of Haskell:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1145743

You may also have luck learning FP with Erlang. It's also functional, but approaches it from a different direction, focusing on reliability and concurrency rather than types and purity. Between Haskell and Erlang, one of them will probably fit your mind better.

I started FP with OCaml, but OCaml makes it too easy to continue writing imperative code when you're actively trying to learn new idioms.

I agree Erlang is also very interesting. I think some of the features looks absolutely fascinating (hot updatable code!), etc. I just haven't found the the time to learn it yet.

I wish Erlang's syntax was more like Haskell, though :\

Your two links are identical..

My bad the other one was supposed to be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322920

Bit of a copy and paste fail...

Javascript is just as good for learning the concept of functional programming. It's often (jokingly) called Scheme with C-like syntax. Unlike lisps though, it doesn't give you macros, which is even more mind-bogling than first-class functions.

Ruby also has decent fp-semantics, but they are not as clearly cut as in Javascript.

Learn Scheme in 20 minutes, because it's that simple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAHA0nJv8EA

Try javascript and/or coffeescript. Valuable skills!

I hear lisp is pretty sweet. Haskell as well, there's a lot going on there. You can program in a very functional style in ruby or javascript if you want something with a more active community, its just that the resources you find on those languages won't be so targeted at FP, because its not their defining feature.

I would recommend OCaml over Lisp, once you've had type inference, there's no going back.

You can try Scala (especially if you know Java).

I initially tried scala when getting back to using a language on the jvm. While scala boasts less verbosity than java I felt like the syntax became more complex than what I was accustomed to and slowed my progress if you can believe that. Java was the first real OO language I learned and then moved onto ruby. Currently working with C. I think in pursuing functional programming I'll probably go with something pure like haskell, ML, or lisp.

Yes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com