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Comment by codygman | Hacker News Reader

This was a great read, I'll be passing it along to anyone wanting to learn Haskell so they can get a good feel for what it's like.

You had some advantages though since you've used Racket in the past.

I feel like your Racket experience helped you draw conclusions that many wouldn't have otherwise. Great work though, I hope you write about more of your experiences.

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I'm curious what conclusions you'd say those are... and if they're good or bad conclusions?

That said, I'm sure I'm totally influenced by various languages I've tried in the past. And FWIW, Racket was also plenty far from my first experience with functional programming. I know so many programming languages that I've gotten pretty used to being able to just "pick them up" in a couple of days (Racket pretty much included).

Haskell... not so much.

It was the same for me. I had two years of production erlang experience before trying Haskell on and it was a rough ride but very worth it (we now use it exclusively in production).

A little tired, but here are a few things that gave you a very big advantage in your Haskell endeavour IMO.

- Knowing to start from scratch and assuming it's some install issue with ghc-mod (this probably saved you a lot of time) - already knowing partial application and that you can use backticks to take advantage of it in Haskell - just knowing what pointfree means - knowing about hoogle - knowing how to search hoogle and what type of function you needed - having an interest in the asthetics of your code leading to experimentation that seems pointless but teaches you a lot - having confidence/knowledge of being able to just plugin functions/types.

As far as conclusions, I'm mostly commenting on the conclusions you simply made from the types... what people sometimes call "type tetris". Knowing you needed `(a, a) -> Bool`, searching hoogle, then coming to the conclusion of I'll implement it myself and moving on.

For a while it seemed like you were going to get caught in "point free hell" and give up on your task... something I've sadly done in the past.

Then knowing to ask for help in #haskell and /r/haskell really helped you.

I know I haven't really answered your question of "what conclusions you'd say they are"... what I was really trying to say is you made a lot of conceptual leaps I wouldn't expect someone with very little Haskell experience to make.

If I remember I'll try to come back to this tomorrow and look for a few examples of those conceptual leaps.

I know what you mean here, especially wrt Haskell, however I've been recently ploughing through the Standard ML videos hosted by Washington University (which also later apparently goes into Racket and Ruby), and found it has aided my understanding greatly. I'd certainly suggest having a look too, if only for the SML stuff, then maybe having another go at Haskell.

I'd also poke about at the wiki-book 'Write a scheme in 48 hours' (in Haskell) which I've also found useful (although the pdf version has some errors, so I've been preferring the HTML version http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H... )

Apologies if you've already been through these materials! :)

http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse341/13wi/

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