On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 4:40 PM, Martin Drautzburg
Hello all,
often, when I read tutorials or lectures about haskell, I am absolutely intrigued by the solutions presented there. It often creates this "aha" effect and I think "yes, this perfectly describes the problem to solve, this is what the problem IS".
But alas, I have difficulties to come up with equally brilliant solutions for my own problems.
Human learning is far more mimetic than we realize. See one master and one goes: This is incredible! See 10 and one starts picking up small patterns they use See 100s (or a few over long periods) and one starts becoming like them. A favourite example of mine: Today J S Bach is regarded as the pinnacle of western classical music. When he was a young man he spent much of his time just copying out 'the masters' (in quotes because today they are not regarded today in the same category as Bach. So go ahead -- keep getting awed by masterly 'works of (functional) art'
As for learning haskell, I am now pretty comfortable with it, but I fail to apply it to real world problems.
I am pretty good at semantic data modelling, but this technique gives me nothing but trouble, when I try to apply it in the functional world (while it works well in the OO world).
What I am trying now it asking "what do I want the system to compute in the first place" and then think about how to implement these top-level functions. Do you think that this is a good way to start?
Other than that I was trying to find some information about haskell as a specification language, but could not find anything. Is this a sensible idea at all? If not, how would you write a specification if not in haskell itself?
So if you have any pointers on how to address a non-trivial problem in haskell, this would by much appreciated.
Dont underestimate the trivial. One of the difficulties with modern haskell is that advanced type hackery is taking so much center-stage that simple stuff is getting neglected. I have a page of 'basic stuff' that is good nourishment to all (not just functional) programmers: http://blog.languager.org/2012/10/functional-programming-lost-booty.html My favourite books are Bird and Wadler and Chris Reade Martin Henson (yes that gives away my age!) And of course spj's bible on implementation, not so much for the implementation as for the foundations. --
Martin
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