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Comment by ihaveajob | Hacker News Reader

Haskell, and functional programming at the same time. In school I wasn't properly introduced to it (learned some Lisp on paper, during half a semester, and that's it). It's quite the steep road so far, especially since I can only work on it during spare bits of time.

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Me too. I learned the basics at uni in 2000. Had a few plays since but I really need to get stuck in - I want to get to the point where I understand the fancy stuff like Lenses. Beyond the cool stuff I strongly believe it can be really practical and I would like to convince my employer (or any employer!) to seriously consider it for a production system.

You can't hire Haskell programmers by the 40ft container-load like you can with Java or C#. You won't need as many Haskell programmers though. And they should get paid accordingly :-)

Haskell has a duality: It is a nice "toy". I mean that in a good way - fun to play with, enjoyable to code. But also I can see it being a serious contender for writing Enterprise systems where you need clarity, accuracy and readability of business rules.

Haskell functions can extend Enterprise systems in an elegant and powerful way, by adding on rules that are safe because they have no side effects. They can only affect things indirectly through their returned results.

This means the basic Enterprise system you ship can be simpler and then you can customize it more easily and with more confidence. I envisage smart non-programmers can probably write the custom business rules as tight Haskell scripts.

TL;DR I want to cut the cruft with Haskell!

I'm also looking into learning Haskell and I know a very little about functional programming (I'm still in university but I think no one will ever introduce me to that), any advice on where to start?

I've been learning Haskell for the last year and a half, though I've been working with functionally inspired languages for 8 years. Haskell is wonderful, easily the most fun I've had learning a language in 20 years.

I'd advise not getting distracted by monads and other glamorous parts of the language. Monads are pretty abstract, and they won't likely make much sense until you've written enough Haskell to feel the pain-points they address.

I've learned a lot by reading blog posts from these people:

* Aditya Bhargava: http://adit.io

* Gabriel Gonzalez: http://www.haskellforall.com/

* Joseph Abrahamson: http://jspha.com/

* kqr (I don't know this person's full name. Avatar not withstanding, I'm pretty sure kqr isn't David Bowie): https://github.com/kqr/gists

* Edward Kmett: https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/edwardk

Most of all, I advise not getting discouraged. Haskell has a lot of concepts that seem intimidating. Many times I've spent days trying to figure out what the hell a contravariant functor is, only to get really discouraged. At times I've doubted my own abilities and whether learning the language was worth it. I stuck to it, and a year and a half later I'm pretty damn capable with Haskell (and I know what a contravariant functor is!) and I'm having the time of my life learning more about it.

Thank you, I have seen a lot of interesting examples over there, I can't wait to understand more about them!

Here's a free e-book on Haskell that I used in university: www.learnyouahaskell.com

You can also support the author by purchasing a copy!

Edit: I'm new and do not know how to make that into a link. Sorry about that.

It looks well structured and I found a lot of positive reviews about it, I will give it a try! Thanks :)

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