Michael Vanier wrote:
P. R. Stanley wrote:
What are the pre-requisites for Lambda calculus?
Thanks
Paul
Learning lambda calculus requires no prerequisites other than the
ability to think clearly. However, don't think that you need to
understand all about lambda calculus in order to learn Haskell. It's
more like the other way around: by the time you've learned Haskell,
you've already unwittingly absorbed a good deal of lambda calculus.
Once again, I recommend Pierces _Types and Programming Languages_ as a
reference if you really feel you need to learn this now.
For absorbing the functional style of programming (which is what you
really should be working on at this point), the book _Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs_ by Abelson and Sussman (which uses
Scheme, not Haskell) is very valuable. For learning about recursion,
the book _The Little Schemer_ by Friedman and Felleisen is also very
good (and quite short); it also uses Scheme. However, most of the
insights of both books carry over into Haskell (with a change of syntax,
of course
How to Design Programs (HtDP) www.htdp.org is another Scheme teaching
text that is lower level, slower paced. It may be too low level for
you, i.e. rather boring, or it may be helpful. I'd definitely recommend
reading SICP after it. Programming Languages: Application and
Interpretation (PLAI)
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/ is a good book
for either before or after SICP (which is also available online at
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/). All of these use Scheme, but most of it
uses a very "functional" style and it should transfer to Haskell very
easily, especially the PLAI one. It would be very nice to see a
HtDP-style online book for Haskell; none of the currently available
introductions really fit this role in my opinion.
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