Szymon Kaliski

Learning Haskell

Haskell has been on my to-learn list for a long time, I was interested in a different approach to functional programming than LISP, and was ready to give strong typing a chance. I was also tired of building things every month and decided to take my time and focus on input, rather than output.

I took 15-45 minutes every day to read through "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good" ↗ (free to read online). I was taking notes as I go, and pushed them to online repo: szymonkaliski/haskell-playground ↗

First impressions

Setup was extremely simple, I didn't need anything special besides brew install ghc. vim already supports Haskell, so when compared to Reason (another language I tried out recently), the setup was much easier.

I enjoyed working with ghci REPL similarly to how I like to work with Clojure — in split view with my editor, executing code piece by piece.

"Learn You a Haskell" was a very nice introduction to the language, and as far as I understand it coveres all the basis.

What I enjoyed about the language so far:

1. How terse it is — there's a lot of strange symbols ::, (\, >>=, but syntax itself is quite simple, functions usually are very short, but that doesn't come in hand with them being simple to understand (at least from my newbie perspective)
2. Immutability — I try to write most of my code in a functional and immutable fashion, but having it be enforced by a language, and not a programmer, is a great feature
3. Types — I usually prefer non-typed languages, but Haskell's type system is really interesting, and type annotations are very helpful in trying to understand what functions do; I'm still fuzzy on some details, and plan on doing a bit more reading on type classes

What I didn't enjoy that much:

1. Nomenclature — "applicative", "functor", "monoid", "monad"..., some of the concepts behind the names seem easy, some seem hard, but trying to understand some explanation filled with those cryptic names can lead to a headache
2. There's only a few longer examples in the book, so I haven't actually written that much code yet, but I plan on spending next month exploring some popular libraries (Tidal and Haskell's OpenGL bindings if I get them to work)

Fin.

I doubt if I'll ever get paid to write Haskell, but I'm sure this month wasn't wasted, I learned a few new concepts and looked at things from new perspective which is always a big win.

I'm curious to see how different libraries utilise Haskell type system and how working with bigger pieces of code looks like.

Backlinks

1. 2017-11-10Learning Haskell part 2 — Exploring Tidal and Diagrams¹