On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 3:00 AM, <beginners-request@haskell.org> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

  1. Re:  How to think in Haskell (David Virebayre)
  2.  How to think in Haskell (Jun HU) (Sean Charles)
  3. Re:  How to think in Haskell (Jun HU) (Gregg Reynolds)
  4. Re:  How to think in Haskell (Ertugrul Soeylemez)
  5.  Computational Linguistic (Luca Ciciriello)
  6. Re:  Computational Linguistic (SOLVED) (Luca Ciciriello)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:10:45 +0100
From: David Virebayre <dav.vire+haskell@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] How to think in Haskell
To: Brent Yorgey <byorgey@seas.upenn.edu>
Cc: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID:
       <AANLkTik3yaYtdOJ5ZOtxwj8xn5m7CjGrjL32RD80_0+Z@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

2010/12/16 Brent Yorgey <byorgey@seas.upenn.edu>:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 04:41:24PM +0100, Luca Ciciriello wrote:
>> Hi, here my path (in correct order) I followed to learn to think functionally:

>> 1) Curry-Howard Isomorphism
>> 2) Type Theory & Functional Programming
>> 3) The Hindley-Milner Type inference algorithm
>> 4) Basic Category Theory
>> 5) Notions of computation and monads
>> 6) Denotational semantics
>> 7) Monads for functional programming
>> 8) Theorems for free.
>> 9) A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class

> These are all wonderful topics. ?But I strongly disagree with the
> notion that one must understand all of these before even starting a
> Haskell tutorial (!), or even that one must understand all of these to
> be able to "think functionally" in some sense.

... aaaaand I'm going to agree with Brent here.

It took me a while to have many things "click", but I found it hard to
thoroughly read many papers. The mathematical notation which I'm not
familiar with often is a problem to stay focused.

What helped for me was reading tutorials and practice. Reading about
people's problems on Caf?, and reading the replies. Re-reading several
times a tutorial, weeks apart. I wish I had Real world haskell was I
was starting, but I have it now and I'm glad I do.

I can't claim I understand more than Haskell 98, but it's more than
enough for a start.

David.



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 14:44:09 +0000
From: Sean Charles <sean@objitsu.com>
Subject: [Haskell-beginners] How to think in Haskell (Jun HU)
To: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <1292597049.3903.18.camel@sean-desktop>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

I learned Smalltalk in 1999, then I found LISP because Alan Kay said it
was the most awesome language ever invented. That got me hooked into
using s-expressions for everything!

Then I found Erlang and that was just brilliant, although I still missed
the s-expression format of LISP.

Then, about seven months ago I decided to try Haskell, I bought the Real
World Haskell book and I've been trying to get better every day I can.

I've been a software develoepr for aobut twenty-six years, from assembly
language on chips and DEC/VAX right through to today and without doubt
Haskell has been my single most frustrating learning experience ever.

And that my friends is a compliment to Haskell!  :)

I am *not* a mathematician, I did 'A'-level maths and physics and
computers back when Clive Sinclair was a force to be reckoned with.
To be told I have to read a big list of stuff with titles that would
make people think I was speaking in tongues doesn't cut it for me. For
my day job I *have* to cut PHP/Drupal, so I applied learning Haskell and
made myself some tools that generate Drupal code!

Make it relevant to what you do everyday, that way it will carry more
meaning for you, why spend hours head-scratching over some fancy pants
monadic kung-fu lesson when you can as easily learn to read a file and
process each line, do something with it and then create a new file.

First rule of optimisation: Don't do it. It was how I felt learning LISP
too, there are so many functions to do things, which is the 'right' one?
Make it work first then you can step back and say, "Can I do this more
succinctly using more advanced language features?"

Don't try to learn it all at once, it's depressing! I know!


BIG HELP: The single biggest thing that helped me was to download the
PDF slide-notes and watch both parts of Simon Peyton Jones talks, all
available here:
http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-spj.html

It was when I realises that, unlike C++ for example, where there is an
implicit 'this' pointer stuffed in the stack, in Haskell programs there
is an implicit pointer to the type information being passed around which
made lots of things click for me like "How does it know?" LOL

Haskell is the classic elephant sandwich; a formidable task, but
everytime I understand something new it feels great!

Best of luck!
:)
Sean Charles






------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 09:18:42 -0600
From: Gregg Reynolds <dev@mobileink.com>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] How to think in Haskell (Jun HU)
To: sean@objitsu.com
Cc: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID:
       <AANLkTimXZj__z2uzJB-T9tH0f-ftkcAUVCMb-nuFc3QQ@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 8:44 AM, Sean Charles <sean@objitsu.com> wrote:

>
> I've been a software develoepr for aobut twenty-six years, from assembly
> language on chips and DEC/VAX right through to today and without doubt
> Haskell has been my single most frustrating learning experience ever.
>
> And that my friends is a compliment to Haskell!  :)
>
> Don't try to learn it all at once, it's depressing! I know!
>

I took my first crack at Haskell 5+ years ago, was befuddled by the term
"constructor" and left completely in the dark by monads. So I moved on to
other things.  It took me about three tries and a lot of research into
various corners of computer science (I was a liberal arts major) to reach
the point where I understood the terminology and began to grasp the big
picture.  Fortunately there's a lot more information available for beginners
now.

Even though the likelihood of me ever getting paid to program in Haskell is
nil, what I've gained from studying it vastly outweighs the considerable
effort I put into it.  I thought I was learning another programming
language; in fact, I was learning to think about computation, logic, and
mathematics in ways that were completely new and very enlightening to me.
 To really really understand it all, you have to delve into lambda calculus
most obviously, but also intuitionistic mathematics and logic, proof theory,
category theory, and various other fascinating topics.  In 100 or even 10
years such stuff will form part of a basic educational program, but at the
moment it's like a secret world of magical beasts.  The down side is there's
nobody to talk to about it (except via mailing lists) since almost nobody
outside of specialists even knows this world exists.


>
> BIG HELP: The single biggest thing that helped me was to download the
> PDF slide-notes and watch both parts of Simon Peyton Jones talks, all
> available here:
> http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-spj.html


His book "Implementation of Functional
Languages<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/slpj-book-1987/index.htm>"
is also very helpful, even if you have no interest in actually implementing
functional languages.  It (and various other pubs) has proven very helpful
in deciphering some of the arcane bits of terminology that often pop up in
discussions of Haskell and FP, such as boxing, bottom, "weak head normal
form", etc.  You can skim the gory details and still get a lot out of it.
 Plus, I just found the tutorial
version<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/pj-lester-book/>
.

-Gregg
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Message: 4
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 08:00:16 +0100
From: Ertugrul Soeylemez <es@ertes.de>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] How to think in Haskell
To: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <20101218080016.103692e0@tritium.streitmacht.eu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Jun HU <junhufr@gmail.com> wrote:

> My first language is C, and I've strong intention in learning a pure
> functional programming language. My very first question is how to
> think in the functional programming way, anyone has some ideas.
> Really appreciate....

Well, programming is about building a house.  Using the imperative
procedural paradigm (C) you express how to build the house (what do you
need to do to reach the goal?), much like in a recipe.  Using the
declarative functional paradigm (Haskell) you express what the house is,
much like in a scheme or specification.

Haskell is about as functional as a programming language can get by
concept, because with the equals sign (=) you write actual equations.
In most other languages the equals sign expresses assignment, not
equation.


Greets,
Ertugrul


--
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://ertes.de/





------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 11:32:38 +0100
From: Luca Ciciriello <luca_ciciriello@hotmail.com>
Subject: [Haskell-beginners] Computational Linguistic
To: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP16246E38E0F3B9CA892E1B39A170@phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi All.
It's my impression or all "items" about computational linguistic are been ripped away from Hackage?

Luca.


------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2010 11:34:52 +0100
From: Luca Ciciriello <luca_ciciriello@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Computational Linguistic (SOLVED)
To: Luca Ciciriello <luca_ciciriello@hotmail.com>
Cc: beginners@haskell.org
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP144B35C877E3BE11E4E4E179A170@phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Ok, my fault. I was searching in wrong place.

Luca.

On Dec 18, 2010, at 11:32 AM, Luca Ciciriello wrote:

> Hi All.
> It's my impression or all "items" about computational linguistic are been ripped away from Hackage?
>
> Luca.
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> Beginners@haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>




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