On 27 April 2012 21:16, Nicholas Kormanik <nkormanik@gmail.com> wrote:

So, my question is: Does it make practical sense to spend time learning
Haskell for the purpose of adding it to my assortment of 'tools' -- to
quickly do this or that, as the need arises?

Is there any better general practical 'tool' (or, if you want, 'programming
language') to add to my arsenal.

No one can give you advice on what tool to use without knowing what the task or who you are in more detail than you provided. And you're often better with several tools than "general" one - trying to saw with a hammer isn't easy.

Unless you're unusually smart in the IQ sense and/or have a maths or formal logic background, then I'd say that Haskell would be a miserable choice for a first programming language.

As for tools you might look at for tasks that I ***guess*** that a trader is likely to want to do:

- For web scraping and text mining, Groovy, Clojure, Ruby, Python and (maybe) Perl are reasonable choices

- For both number crunching and symbolic maths, look at sagemaths (which is scripted in Python) - it's a reasonable free alternative to both Matlab (number crunching) and Mathematic (symbolics)

..Which I suppose makes Python the no-brainer choice. Python is easy to learn, the community is supportive, there are lots of reasonable books and tutorials. I think it also has stuff around for working with Excel spreadsheets, which I'd imagine you might want to do.

Haskell is actually a better language than any of the above (leaving aside learnability and without defining "better") but for real world use libraries count more than language features. It would take you years to write the equivalent of sagemaths in Haskell, which rather negates Haskell's advantages if you need that functionality.