A colleague with a mathematics and Lisp background is wanting to learn more about Haskell. The books he's looked at concentrate more on building up from the basics and getting the syntax right, etc., whereas really he's looking more of a top-down view that makes Haskell's features and behavior clear and relates them to category theory, etc. Would anyone be able to suggest some good references?
-- Mark
For lispers, I like to point out this sentence of section 6.4 of the Haskell 98 Report: Haskell provides several kinds of numbers; the numeric types and the operations upon them have been heavily influenced by Common Lisp and Scheme. For mathematicians, I'd recommend the first 5 pages of: Calculating Functional Programs, Jeremy Gibbons, 2002 http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/jeremy.gibbons/publications/index.html# calculating Then I'd mention the Acid Rain Theorem, Fusion Theorem, Wadler's _Theorems for Free!_. When I'd show some exemplary fp programs: Bridging the Algorithm Gap: A Linear-Time Functional Program for Paragraph Formatting. Oege de Moor and Jeremy Gibbons, 1999 http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/jeremy.gibbons/publications/index.html# para Financial Contracts: An Adventure in Financial Engineering, 2000 Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, and Julian Seward http://www.lexifi.com/resources.html#paper Functional Specification of JPEG Decompression, and an Implementation for Free, Jeroen Fokker, 1995 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/72092.html Modeling Web Interactions, Paul Graunke, Robert Bruce Findler, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Matthias Felleisen, 2003 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/graunke03modeling.html Haskell Server Pages Functional Programming and the Battle for the Middle Tier, Erik Meijer, Dannyy van Velzen, 2000 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/318262.html Writing High-Performance Server Applications in Haskell, Case Study: A Haskell Web Server, Simon Marlow, 2000 http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/bib.html (about the 4th one down) And then, the more introductory material: Why Functional Programming Matters, John Hughes http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html and here's a summary of the paper: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~j-hamer/360/why-fp-matters.html Section 3.1.3 of SICP: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ Why no one uses functional languages, Philip Wadler, 1998 http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/wadler98why.html here's an old, but still relevant summary of some issues keeping fp from taking over the world: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~zorn/cs5535/Fall-1997/haskell-summary.html Some general links: http://haskell.readscheme.org/ http://www.haskell.org Hope this isn't too overwhelming, but it was an opportunity for me to gather my thoughts. Enjoy, John Atwood