Re: [Haskell-beginners] Re: Motivation to Learn Haskell

My tuppence worth is the wonderful conciseness of programs, the way abstraction works, it almost forces you into creating simple very testable functions. These functions will have a well defined uncomplicated transformation, and as such may be re-used to build more complex functions. As a beginner, the templtation is to resist the temptation to implemrnt imperative code, but to link functions together in my thinking like a shell script. With a shell script programs are stated left to right with the output of the leftmost being fed into the next one to the right. I think with Haskell on a similar pattern with a pipeline of functions feed from the right-most one. The next thing is to learn associativity rules and the use of parenthesis, and $ operators. Read everything on www.haskell.org. Confuse yourself by trying to read Prelude source code! -- Andrew Edinburgh,Scotland On 4 September 2010 01:30, Benjamin L. Russell wrote:

Tim Perry writes:

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If you do jump in, I'd recommend the Real World Haskell book or the The Haskell School of Expression book.

Another interesting title is _Programming in Haskell,_ by Graham Hutton (see http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.htmlhttp://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/book.html). Duncan Coutts has written a review on the title (see http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book-review.pdfhttp://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/%7Egmh/book-review.pdf ).

As for motivation for learning Haskell, one motivator is the purely functional nature of the language, which is referentially transparent and therefore facilitates reasoning about programs. Haskell has roots in category theory, and therefore, it is frequently possible to use category-theoretical reasoning to reason about the correctness of programs; this cannot be said of most other programming languages.

-- Benjamin L. Russell

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Good luck, Tim

----- Original Message ---- From: Lorenzo Isella To: beginners@haskell.org Sent: Fri, September 3, 2010 3:57:26 PM Subject: [Haskell-beginners] Motivation to Learn Haskell

Dear All, It is my first post to this list and please do not take it as an attempt

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From time to time, I try to find the motivation to learn at least the fundamentals of another programming language. I normally use R and Python on a daily basis (but I am not that much into OO

start any flamewar. programming) and have a good knowledge of Fortran and a rather superficial one of C. Beside learning a new language as a sort of mind expanding exercise, I

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figure out how and if it can save me some time in my work and how it measures up against other languages. These days I tend to rely on R for data analysis and visualization whereas I use Python (in particular Numpy+SciPy) for number crunching (it is very convenient to use scipy/numpy to solve ODE's, manipulate arrays and so on). Now, I wonder what benefit I would gain from learning Haskell since I

to try to mainly

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write codes for numerical simulations/data analysis. I know Haskell is gaining momentum e.g. in the financial environment (I happened to see Haskell knowledge as a specification in some quant jobs) hence it must be more than suitable for numerical work and, by the little I have understood so far, it allows one to write code really resembling mathematical expressions (I was impressed by guards and curried functions). However, it also looks to me (correct me if I am mistaken) that Haskell is a far cry from the wealth of standard and contributed scientific modules you have in Python or R and thanks to which you do not re-implement the wheel yourself. Any thoughts/suggestions are really appreciated. Cheers

Lorenzo _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

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