peterv wrote:
It looks like its gonna take a long time for me to learn Haskell. I'm not sure if my long history of imperative and object-oriented programming has something to do with it. Reading Haskell books like SOE is one thing, but writing software in Haskell is really difficult for me.
It takes practice. ;-)
Not only do I miss the "spoiled OO programmer" IDEs with all their candy and code completion and assistants
Ah, but in Haskell, you don't need to *write* as much code in the first place! :-D
but I also get the feeling that although similar programs in Haskell or typically N times shorter than their imp/OO counterparts, it would take *me* at least N^2 longer to write them ;) Is this true for Haskell in general?
Yeah, Haskell is definitely *not* a language for "hacking away as fast as your fingers can type without thinking too much". It's more like a game of chess - you spend a lot of time trying to bend your mind around the best way to achieve a thing. But then, when you actually start typing, you often get there faster. Or realise that the type system is going to stop you... :-/
Regarding those monads, I read a lot of stuff about these beast, trying to get a high-level understanding about them (and apparently I'm not the only newby who struggled with that ;), but after having read "You Could Have Invented Monads!" and then reading http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/marktoberdorf, it all became much clearer. Those pictures really helped...
Monads take a while to "get used to", but they're not so scary after that...