19May/092
Haskell: A Pretty Nice Language
I was going through one of those "every language sucks" periods a few days back, so I decided to do something productive and learn me a Haskell. So far, I'm liking it: the pure functional style isn't as hard as I expected, monads are okay after a bit (though I'm still a little suspicious of them), the strict typing isn't too much of a burden, the polymorphic types are bliss to use, and the pattern matching is simply wonderful. It also comes with an extensive set of libraries and a central repository, which is nice to find in a non-mainstream language. Overall, I think Haskell is a good language to know.
May 20th, 2009 - 20:26
About Monad, I recommend starting with Monoid, then Functor and Applicative, and only then play with Monad. Monad is the most complicated of those four interfaces (type classes), and the most often confused with imperative programming.
May 24th, 2009 - 09:35
See the Haskell reddit discussion .