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Comment by weka | Hacker News Reader

Mind sharing books that got you started? I've been looking into getting started with Haskell myself.

I actually read a book on Functional Programming in Scala [0] as my introduction to FP, so I had a little understanding of concepts in functional programming already, but in terms of just Haskell my recommendation would be that Get Programming with Haskell book by Will Kurt that I mentioned, which is targeted at beginners. Someone else added the Learn You a Haskell Book for Great Good! book online which is a good free online source as well, but since the original version was written in 2011, it might be a few versions behind on the GHC compiler compared to the Kurt book which was released in 2019.

After going through an introductory resource to learn syntax and concepts, other good beginner resources I have used are the Functional Programming Discord [1], the free Data61 course that Brian McKenna goes over [2], and the Tsoding series on YouTube [3]. The Practical Haskell book I mentioned is good too, but I found it a bit higher level than these other resources.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Functional-Programming-Scala-Paul-Chi...

[1]: https://discordapp.com/invite/FvT2Y5N

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzIZzvbplSM

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_D4P-KRNKs

The best guide I've found for this is Learn You a Haskell for Great Good[0]. You'll probably see lots of recommendations for it around here; it's a very gentle/conversational intro to the language that's fun to follow along with IMO.

[0]: http://learnyouahaskell.com

Can you help me understand which kind of projects use Haskell language?

Do we have many long term jobs for Haskell developers?

So, I have recently been at Zurihac, attended by ~500 people.

From what I have seen, there have been roughly 4 groups:

* people running their verified-contracts on blockchain strartups with haskell stack

* people interested in GHC as a compiler (i.e. developing new extensions for their phd theses)

* people doing consulting projects

* people running their company on haskell because they like the stack

Some projects were really interesting, like a a haskell-inspired language that is compiled to VHDL, or various use-cases for Dhall (typesafe alternative to i.e. yaml, that supports functions, but isn't turing complete)

I still have on my todo-list "Do at least one PR for Pandoc!" as that is a haskell project that seems to have nice entry-level issues :)

And I know there are teams in FAANG that use haskell, but I don't think they hire too many people :-)

There's a pretty good outline of which kinds of projects Haskell is well suited for by Gabriel Gonzalez here: https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md

In terms of long-term jobs, I think learning concepts from statically-typed functional programming language will improve your code quality (read: chance at sustainable employment) in general, but actual prospects are probably area dependent. I am lucky enough to live in a tech hub so there are many Angel List jobs here for Haskell and Scala, but this may not be the experience for every city.

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