a word from a beginner (with a CS background): Alternatively, just do not use compiler specific features in your programs and this will make your programs work with different compilers. I went away from Lisp because there are no types. someone said once that Lisp is a sort of intermediate language that many people happen to like to program in. an assembly language of sorts. I went away from ML because once I got a taste of laziness, having my parameters evaluated before my function is called started to upset me ;-), and also I do not like that I have to use tuples in ML's datatypes. At least I did not find a way to not use them... But then of course one starts seeing all these problems with expressions taking too much heap space when writing programs of considerable size... But then using a purely functional language will teach you to forget trying to change a tuple or anything else in place (although I saw libraries in GHC that can change arrays, etc, in-place but I never used them), which is helpful I believe because it gives a different perspective on writing code. konst

-----Original Message----- From: Max Kirillov [mailto:max630@mail.ru] Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 1:10 PM To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Subject: Re: Ground Up

Hi!

I'm far not an expert in Haskell, but I'll venture to say "I'm in". I'm not an CS student and I have never been (I learned Solid State Physics). I became there in about 6 months without paying a cent. Well, I paid for dialup. I also spent a lot of time. My wife should hate Haskell.

I would recommend you not to be confined by Haskell. Take a look at Lisp, ML. First, it helps to get into concepts rather than into details of syntax parsing of high-order polymorphism. I began learning FP with Erlang, and I think it helped me.

Further, Haskell, though _very_ nice, is probably not "the best choice" for a "pragmatic programming". It is too alive. Different compilers are not 100% compatible each to other, and even different versions of the same compilers may be incompatible. You should be ready either to stick yourself and your co-wokers to a certain version of the compiler or to spend some significal time to keep you programs working with any compiler.

Maybe you will find that it's better to use Ocaml or Scheme. Thay have own neats, and seem to be more stable.

Max.

...

Good day everyone, I'm a haskell newbie trying to seeking advice to advance myself.

My backgrounds are: * As a non-CS student, I have absolutely no knowledge of lambda calculus * And unfortunately I have to make painful decision on spending $30 on a book or three days' meal

While my goals are: * Become a pragmatic haskell programmer in the shortest time * At the minimal expense

What I have done for the past few weeks were: * I read almost all the free educational sources at www.haskell.org, * Subscribed to this mailing list and try to digest every mail * Read most of the "The Haskell School of Expression" (by Paul Hudak) and the non-theoretical chapters of the "An Introduction To Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell" (by AJT Davie), which are the only two introductory level haskell related books in our library

However, my problems are: * I still don't understand most of the codes I found, like

On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 09:41:10PM +0800, Jerry, JiJie wrote: the various

...

haskell libraries * I still have no clue of most (ok, almost all) of what is being discussed in this mailing list

So I'm eager to know if there are cost-effective ways to achieve my goals or at least leverage myself from the beginner's level.

Your advice would be greatly appreciated!

Regards, Jerry _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

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