January 15, 2018

Haskell

I first learned about Haskell when watching an interview with Larry Wall. They asked him what 5 programming languages he thinks everyone ought to know about, and he mentioned Haskell. I had to rewind and listen several times to convince myself he was not saying "Pascal", then a quick search demonstrated there really was a language "Haskell". Then a few minutes of work got it installed on my Fedora linux system, and then the trouble really started.

There are a couple of quotes that a person getting ready to launch into Haskell ought to ponder. One is from the Haskell development team -- one of their mottos was "avoid success at all costs!". The other is a clever quip from a person I greatly respect, namely: "The problem with functional languages is that they don't function very well."

With those words of wisdom planted firmly in our minds, we can boldly move forward. I should also mention that I have invested a lot of energy into learning Haskell and have yet to be able to do anything useful with it. This is not to say that that time has been wasted. As Larry Walls suggested, my mind has been enlarged and I now can take a different view of many problems than I used to. And it has been fun.


Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]