Learning Haskell

Categories: Programming

It’s long past time for me to learn a new language. Stretch the old brain-cells. Stop the rust. But no, I haven’t decided to learn Rust, or at least not yet. Instead I’ve spent a couple of week’s worth of spare time learning Haskell, mainly because somebody local volunteered to run some haskell tutorial sessions.

It’s been an interesting experience, and I’ve made some notes here. You might find them interesting, boring, or simply wrong; it’s just my understanding at the current time.

I can’t see using Haskell in any paying work in the next few years. I’m used to seeing questions on Java/C/C++/etc asking “how do I do X”, but the Haskell forums instead seem to be full of “I’ve seen this line of code - what on earth does it do?”. This doesn’t suggest that Haskell is a great language for your average development team. It certainly has been interesting though…