Trading Haskell for a New Language
After committing to Haskell for my new language in 2007 it was largely a failed experiment. I never found a good learning Haskell book. I went through a few tutorials and nothing really clicked much. I found myself wanting to hack around on Ruby rather than mess around with Haskell syntax.
I really prefer a comfortable well-written book introduction to a new language. Something like the Ruby Pickaxe book or Learning Perl. Maybe this year will be Erlang or Common LISP since they both seem to have nice introductory books available.
Ed Gibbs @ January 2, 2008
Perhaps Smalltalk, via Squeak by Example http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/SBE/index.html
In regards to a good book for learning haskell I highly recommend Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programminghttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Haskell-Functional-Programming-International-Computer/dp/0201342758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199355611&sr=8-1
Good luck.
I found “The Little Schemer” a great introduction into Scheme or functional programming as a whole.
Furthermore with DrScheme there is a nice Scheme editor/runtime available for the Mac.
Not sure what you would use for Lisp.
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992
Smalltalk appeals to me a lot, but Ruby is similar enough that I don’t think I’d get quite the brain stretch I’m looking for. If I ever get back to haskell I’ll take a look at Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming.
I have heard good things about “The Little Schemer” from several places so that might be a good one to add to my possible 2008 list. For LISP I was thinking Practical Common LISP which I perused at the bookstore a few times and it looks pretty good.
If you’re still interested in Haskell, try “The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming Through Multimedia”, by Paul Hudak.
# ISBN-10: 0521644089
# ISBN-13: 978-0521644082
We use Erlang at work and it’s great. Very simple, very powerful. OCaml is also very good, although there’s only one introductory book in English (Practical OCaml) and it’s not terrible but not wonderfully written either.
Oh, just noticed your previous comment. Practical Common Lisp is a very nice introduction to parens-land, if you’re so inclined. I’ve never used Lisp for anything concrete, but it’s a nice enough language.
Cheers.
You might take a look at groovy. It’s not all the different syntactically from Java but has some interesting features.
I ended up going with Scheme this year. Groovy’s on my list of languages to watch if it ends up being a major player on the JVM. I already to a fair bit of Ruby so another dynamic language wouldn’t really stretch my brain as much.
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