John Goerzen on Why You Should Learn Haskell

broadcast.oreilly.com

27 points·mqt··5 comments

At first I thought Haskell was cool, but then I realized that I only thought that because it was the latest cool thing to do in programming. Then I thought learning it would be a waste of time.

Then I randomly picked up the book "The Haskell School of Expression" by Paul Hudak (one of the designers of Haskell). It is a great introduction to the language. By page 30 it has already introduced the Haskell notions of bindings, functions, let, recursion and complex nested pattern matching in a very practical and understandable way. It also convinced me to continue learning Haskell because it clearly demonstrates some of the features that (to paraphrase the book) "you probably won't see in mainstream languages for ten years."

.. and that was published, fittingly, 9 years ago.

> By page 30 it has already introduced the Haskell notions of bindings, functions, let, recursion and complex nested pattern matching in a very practical and understandable way.

Why does it take 30 pages for those things?

How about, "Over the first 30 pages, ...". (It covers about as much material as SICP does in same, for example, and the typesetting is comparable.) After that it moves into examples with GL programming, alternating theory and application chapter by chapter.

I don't doubt any of that. But the question is, did you then go and write any actual, production applications using Haskell or did the book just go back on the shelf with all the other academic texts?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com