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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Failing to learn how to program in Haskell made me realize that I had absolutely no understanding of what I was really doing when I was coding and sent me down a deep rabbit hole learning all the computer science concepts I hadn’t ever learned as a self taught programmer.

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I had the same experience with lisp, and it's one of the reasons I chose to keep programming (and eventually major in CS) during college.

It's crazy how easy it is to learn how to pattern match well enough that you can build really useful stuff while still not really understanding what you're doing. Human brains are amazing.

What would you recommended first? I'm also self-taught, just JavaScript, typescript and react and a tiny bit of shell scripting. Job never asks for anything more, but I want to get better at designing, engineering, and building scaleable webapps. So more towards "full stack" I guess.

Haskell sounds super cool, but it seems like nobody really uses it to build things on the web. They mostly just talk about how it "helped them think".

Haskell actually could help a lot with JavaScript. Functional programming, writing stateless functions, function parameters, and generally manipulating functions, are valuable and useful concepts in JavaScript and React, and Haskell forces you to learn and understand them. Alternatively, F# could fill that niche if you prefer its syntax.

ReasonML is a good transition from JS to something like OCaml

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