[Haskell-cafe] Re: Top 20 ``things'' to know in Haskell

Message: 9 Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 10:31:30 -0500 From: "Jacques Carette" Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Top 20 ``things'' to know in Haskell To: Message-ID: <000701c50d2a$189f5590$1b447182@cas.mcmaster.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

The recent post of Graham Klyne (below) reminds me that I have meant to ask: is there a ``top 20'' things a serious programmer should know when writing code in Haskell? Of course there is a lot of programming language theory that would be great to know, but I mean really down-to-earth things like the 2 items below (module Maybe, the 'maybe' function).

The Haskell libraries are quite large, and it is unrealistic to try to get familiar with all of them right away. But getting a ``small'' list would be very useful - I think of this as step 2 after one learns to get comfortable with a language. I had done this (for Maple) for training new hires at Maplesoft, and I definitely noticed that they became more idiomatic programmers faster this way.

Jacques

PS: of course, this could already exist on haskell.org and/or the Wiki, but not in an 'obvious' enough place as I missed it...

Beginners might find this useful: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/d1pt/d1pta/ListDoc/ It's guide to finding the right list function which leads you to it by asking you what you are trying to achieve. john

-----Original Message----- From: haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Graham Klyne Sent: February 7, 2005 10:09 AM To: Yuri D'Elia; haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] [newbye] 'Just a'

You might also be interested in the library function 'maybe': http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/standard-prelude.html#$vmaybe

or maybe (sic) Maybe.fromMaybe in: http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/maybe.html

#g --