Brian Hurt wrote:
I mean, contemplate this trivial exercise for a moment: write a program
that reads from stdin a series of numbers (one number per line), and
writes out the sum of the last n numbers. This is a trivial problem,
and I have no doubt that someone who knows Haskell better than I will
reply to this email with a single line of code that does it.
Sorry, I can't resist :)
main n = print . sum . map read . take n . reverse . lines =<<
getContents
I'm not saying that it's impossible to go directly to Haskell, I'm
saying that it's just very very hard.
[&]
I'm going to offer an opinion here that's likely to be controversial
(in this forum): people new to functional programming shouldn't
learn Haskell first. They should start with either Ocaml or SML first.
If it makes it easier to accept this argument, you can consider
Ocaml and SML as "Haskell with training wheels".
I don't agree. At least, it was different for myself.
Looking at the line of code above, I can't help it, but I perceive
Haskell as being the _simplest_ programming language in the whole world.
I had no trouble learning it (step by step from a book), maybe because
I've happily thrown away everything I (thought I) knew (about
programming). The reward was worth it.
Why do people want side effects? Purity is soo much simpler.
Regards,
apfelmus
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