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 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
Jerry writes:
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
My advice would be to install GHC [*] or Hugs, and do all the exercises from the Hudak textbook. You can't learn to program by reading, you only learn by actually writing programs. Other than that, you could try reading the Haskell 98 Report to learn about the language, and skimming the documentation for the libraries to get an idea of what's available. Again, you'll learn about the libraries by using them, not by reading the docs - but you need to skim at least the contents pages of the docs so you know what's out there. Haskell 98 Report: http://www.haskell.org/definition/ Haskell 98 standard libraries docs: http://www.haskell.org/definition/ Other Haskell libraries docs: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/set/book-hslibs.html Hope this helps! --KW 8-) [*] If you use GHC, you'll probably find the interpeter (GHCi) easier to use and better for experimentation than the compiler (GHC).
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. On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 09:41:10PM +0800, Jerry, JiJie wrote:
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 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
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.
Sorry to disagree. I ported an application that's about 6,000 lines of H'98 code from NHC to GHC. This took less than an hour. (I think the only problem had to do with import rules.) Both before and after it was compatible with HUGS. After I got it past the GHC compiler without errors, there were no subsequent problems with differing interpretations. Earlier ports from Gofer to NHC1.3 and from NHC1.3 to NHC98 where also fairly painless (mostly syntax fiddling). So I have to agree with SPJ, Haskell '98 is consistantly supported by multiple implementations. If you stray outside of Haskell '98, it can be expected that things will not be so smooth, since you will then be using features that range from nonstandard to experimental. -- Cheers, Theodore Norvell ---------------------------- Dr. Theodore Norvell theo@engr.mun.ca Electrical and Computer Engineering http://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo Engineering and Applied Science Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, NF, Canada, A1B 3X5 Currently visiting the Department of Computer Science and ICICS at the University of British Columbia. See my webpage for contact details.
participants (4)
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Jerry, JiJie -
Keith Wansbrough -
Max Kirillov -
Theodore Norvell