Comment by gtani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtani | Hacker News Reader

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Haskell is very fun, and well tutorialized now (2nd half of Thompson book is very good tutorial(2nd ed, $5), there are small speed bumps:

I needed a little better glossary than book provides for "invariant", "witness", other terms folks sling around. It took me a while to figure out hoogle, and I needed to ignore blog posts about bijective vs surjective functions and category theory as a beginner. Also the ghc instance extensions are probably the most thinly documented corner:

    TypeSynonymInstances, -XUndecidableInstances, Flexible, Overlapping, etc

While we're at it, let me throw out a shoutout for Learn You a Haskell For Great Good. One of the best programming books I've read, Miran is excellent at explaining programming concepts.

There are good tutorials to Haskell, but it seems to me that Haskell best practices still evolves fairly quickly. After "Real World Haskell" and "Learn you a Haskell", I still did not know what most of the GHC extensions are for (especially those related to generalizing types seem interesting), how to write idiomatic IO-code (conduits now, apparently? Or is it Pipes?), or how I should choose between the many ways of computing on many cores. Is Data Parallel Haskell mature enough? STM? The par combinator? accelerate? I don't think they mention Template Haskell (which seems powerful). The recommended way to connect to SQL is also in a state of flux (possibly "persistent"?).

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