Besides the fact that hacking in Haskell is a great deal of fun, the main reason I see for learning Haskell: it makes you a better programmer. After a couple of years of playing with Haskell, I can now solve problems that I couldn't before. It's of course hard to tell if Haskell is the reason here, or just experience, but I feel it really is Haskell (actually, functional programming). Haskell made me see the world in a different way (and if I see Oleg's and co's code, I still have an infinitely long road ahead.

The main reason why you should not learn Haskell: it's a bit of a drug; after you learned Haskell, programming in an "industrial strength" language suddenly feels like a waste of time, time better spent learning more Haskell...

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Deniz Dogan <deniz.a.m.dogan@gmail.com> wrote:

2009/9/30 Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin@btinternet.com>:

> (Mr C++ argues that homo sapiens fundamentally think in an imperative way,
> and therefore functional programming in general will never be popular.

Sounds more like Mr C++ fundamentally thinks in an imperative way
because that's what he is used to.

I recently started working with C# and struggled for way too long with
for/foreach loops to do things that in Haskell could be expressed
using only folding, mapping and filtering. When I realised that those
ideas actually exist in System.Linq I suddenly started liking the
language a bit more.

txtCommaSeparatedNames.Text.Split(',').Select(x => x.Trim()).Where(x
=> x.Length > 0).Select(x => Convert.ToInt32(x)).ToList();

Ah, the joy of FP.

--
Deniz Dogan

_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe