ANNOUNCE: Learning Haskell portal, version 0.1

Hello all, Often we see messages from people who want to learn Haskell (something we applaud), but don't know where to begin. The Haskell homepage offers a lot of information, links and papers, but there is no page aimed specifically at beginning programmers. That's why I started to collect some links and put them on one single webpage. I thought about what the target audience would be interested in: getting an implementation, buying a book, reading course material, looking up functions in references and so on. The page I have now is a first start and I will work on it more. I've probably overseen many good tutorials, maybe a book here or there, listed an incorrect pro or con of an implementation and what not. Please tell me about it. If you have useful contributions ( nice slides, exercises with(out) solutions, some handout you give to your students which everyone could benefit from ) tell me about it, too. Enough talk: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~afie/haskell/LearningHaskell.html Cheers, Arjan PS: As one of the people in the Helium team I would not recommend beginners to use Helium yet. The absence of classes which leads to simpler types and messages is just not compatible with the text books and other teaching materials. Our plan is to add enough support for classes so that you can use the books without modification. This can be expected this summer. From that moment on, I will definitely recommend Helium to beginners since the feedback from the system is really great.

Arjan van IJzendoorn wrote:
Often we see messages from people who want to learn Haskell (something we applaud), but don't know where to begin. ...
Enough talk: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~afie/haskell/LearningHaskell.html
Thanks, Arjan, nice work. I would add some significant papers, such as John Hughes' "Why functional programming matters", etc. and perhaps - for some, a little bit advanced readers - some other papers, introducing type classes, perhaps monads (Wadler) etc. Everything can be found through the Home of Haskell, but gathering essential references on your page would shorten the search path. I believe - from some discussions here and on comp.lang.functional (some of them quite annoying...) that it would perhaps be a good idea to put down a relatively comprehensive, easy comparison between Haskell and other languages, notably functional: Clean, also: Scheme, absolutely: ML variants, and Erlang. Such questions are, and will continue to be recurring. Jerzy Karczmarczuk

Hello all, The Learning Haskell page has moved to a better place, the official Haskell homepage. You can now find it at http://www.haskell.org/learning.html and through a link on the Haskell homepage index. Jerzy wrote:
I would add some significant papers, such as John Hughes' "Why functional programming matters", etc.
I've added that paper to the introduction. Other suggestions are welcome.
and perhaps - for some, a little bit advanced readers - some other papers, introducing type classes, perhaps monads (Wadler)
I have added a link to the comp.lang.functional FAQ. It answers many questions beginners might have about functional programming in general, but also about specific languages. And it tells you which papers to read about monads.
[...] perhaps be a good idea to put down a relatively comprehensive, easy comparison between Haskell and other languages, notably functional: Clean, also: Scheme, absolutely: ML variants, and Erlang.
Good idea. I've started a table which you can find a link to in the Learning Haskell introduction. If people have suggestions for other columns, can fill in question marks, know of more important languages, tell us. Or, if you have writing permissions on the Haskell homepage, update the table. Cheers, Arjan
participants (2)
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Arjan van IJzendoorn
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Jerzy Karczmarczuk