On 7/10/07, Jim Burton
Andrew Coppin wrote:
On the one hand, it feels exciting to be around a programming language where there are deep theoretical discoveries and new design territories to be explored. (Compared to Haskell, the whole C / C++ / Java / JavaScript / Delphi / VisualBasic / Perl / Python thing seems so
boring.)
On the other hand... WHAT THE HECK DOES ALL THAT TEXT *MEAN*?! >_<
I agree, it's exciting to use Haskell because of its theoretical underpinning and the sense of it as a lab for PL ideas. The cost of taking part in that (even as an observer) is the background knowledge and common vocabulary you need in order to make sense of a lot of the papers that you may get referred to, presuming you start asking the kind of questions that elicit answers like that. I don't think the amount of background knowledge required is actually that big but if it's missing you will feel like you're going one step forwards and two steps back.
The "Getting Started" thread on Lambda the Ultimate is good - maybe we need a wikipage like that but of links to sources of the type theoretical background to Haskell (is there one already? I see "Research Papers", which obviously has a different purpose).
I don't know where the best place to start would be but, as I said in another thread Andrew, TAPL is great. Re. Curry-Howard, have a look Simon Thompson's book (online for free) http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TTFP/ . Not quick reads (by any means!), but depending on your learning style, better value than asking ad hoc questions and joining the dots via blog posts/wiki pages etc.
I'd like throw in another vote for TAPL. I've been reading it lately and it honestly makes type theory feel fairly simple and natural. I think Pierce's writing is very clear, but occasionally the exercises make the problem sound harder than it is and it gets a little confusing. A friend of mine has the same problem with his category theory book.