I've spent part of the past few months learning Haskell and developing a moderately sized application. I came to this from a long background (20 years or so) of "conventional" programming in a variety of languages (from Fortran and Algol W to Java and Python). For me, learning Haskell has been one of the steepest learning curves of any new language that I have ever learned. Before this project, I was aware of some aspects of functional programming, but had never previously done any "in anger" (i.e. for real). Throughout this period, I've been accumulating some notes about some things that I found challenging along the way. The notes are not organized in any way, and they're certainly not complete. I've published them on my web site [1] in case the perspective might be useful to any "old hands" here. [1] http://www.ninebynine.org/Software/Learning-Haskell-Notes.html ... Also on the topic of perspectives: In recent conversation with a colleague, he mentioned to me that the term "functional programming" has an image problem. He suggested that the term conveys an impression of an approach that is staid, non-progressive or lacking novelty, and is prone to elicit a response of "been there, done that" from programmers who don't realize the full significance of the term "functional". I've also noticed that when I talk about "functional programming", some people tend to think I'm talking about using techniques like functions in C or Pascal (which is course is very desirable, but old hat and not worthy of great excitement). #g ------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact