Or F#, if you know C#, which is the "OCaml for the .NET world".
Now I immediately went from C/C++/C# to Haskell, and yes, that was (is)
hard. For me, the book Haskell School of Expression did it... All you
need is a good book and lots of patience...
Brian Hurt wrote:
On Sun, 14 Oct 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Vimal wrote:
I like learning by
comparison with other similar languages. This approach worked for me
when I tried learning Python+Perl together. The nicer syntax and
easier object-orientedness made me leave Perl behind and pursue
Python.
I also tried it for Haskell (Lisp+OCaml+Haskell together).
This probably works quite well for mainstream programming languages
(since they're all so similar), but is unlikely to work at all for
Haskell (since, as far as I know, no other programming language on
Earth is remotely like it - Miranda excluded). Even Lisp and Erland
are nothing like Haskell, and they're supposedly based on the same
ideas.
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". And that the original poster,
rather than giving up on Haskell, should instead put Haskell on the
backburner and instead learn Ocaml (which is likely to be hard
enough). Then, in a year or two, start taking another swing at Haskell.
The problem is that Haskell has a lot of big ideas that all come at
you pretty much immediately. Learning a new language in a new
paradigm is a lot harder than learning in a new language in a paradigm
you already know. If you know Java or C#, it's not that hard to learn
Python or Ruby, because you already know how to think in objects. The
problem with going from a C/Java/Ruby paradigm to Haskell is that
Haskell isn't just one paradigm shift, it's several all rolled into one:
- Purely functional
- Lazy
- Monadic
- Strongly typed
Each one of these has a huge impact in how you think about problems
and design programs- I'd argue about as large an impact as Objects
have. These are all good things (well, I'd admit to not being 100%
sure about pure laziness), and knowing how to think in these paradigms
is definately a good thing.
And the situation is worse with pure functional languages. When you
move from, say C/Pascal/Fortran to Java/Ruby/Python, you don't have to
learn new data structures and new algorithms. A doubly linked list is
still just a doubly linked list, still has the same properties, and
still has more or less the same implementation. In addition to
learning Haskell, you also need to relearn basic computer science.
You need to learn what a realtime lazy catenable dequeue is, how to
implement it, and why you need one, all the while struggling with the
syntax, type errors, and all the other problems trying to learning a
new language.
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. But just think for a moment the number of different paradigm
shifts that you need to make to write this program in Haskell.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to go directly to Haskell, I'm
saying that it's just very very hard.
Ocaml, meanwhile, is in many ways the C++ of the functional world.
C++ was needed for object orientation to take off, because it allowed
you to continue to program in plain old procedural C when you needed
to get something done, and to play with OO concepts and ideas as you
have the time/inclination/need. Then, once people became comfortable
with objects and OO thinking, they were ready for the real OO languages.
In a similiar fasion, Ocaml allows you to write old fasioned impertive
code when you need to just get something working. And as you have the
time/inclination/need to, you can start playing with more advanced
functional concepts, like purely applicative data structures, lazy
evaluation, and even monads.
Brian
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