I am very much enjoying learning Haskell

As I have mentioned, I am learning Haskell to fill a gap in my programming language tool kit: a concise, productive language with great run time performance (low memory use and efficient utilization of multi-core CPUs).

I am experiencing another benefit: a different way to analyze and solve problems. Learning Haskell reminds me of using Prolog. Obviously Prolog and Haskell are very different programming languages so the comparison is really in how different they are from the languages that I usually use in my work (Java, Lisp, and Ruby). It has been over two years since I used Prolog in a consulting job but I used to use Prolog a fair amount. For the near future I am happy learning Haskell for a few specific applications and for giving me a fresh programming perspective. I am also pleased to see the wide range of Haskell libraries and the Haskell community seems interesting. I have been using Planet Haskell as a launch point for reading.

Comments

  1. J.F. Zarama9:53 AM

    Reading your post, I have an observation to make. I do most of my work using Java so it was natural to select Scala to explore functional programming. I found Scala a bit overwhelming at first and tried Haskell for a while given the numerous references to it as Scala's root. I found Haskell easier to follow. But then I did understand the quirks behind Scala. Now I find that I am learning both, Haskell and Scala, something I generally avoid in the effort to keep things simple. On my Ubuntu environment I have Real World Haskell and Programing in Scala open along with Haskell GHCi and JEdit + Scala plug-in open; also, I just tried Netbeans 6.5 + Scala combination that works quite well. Anyway, I have much to read and learn but I wanted to comment on my Scala to Haskell to Scala to Haskell and Scala learning and experimenting experience

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant10:32 AM

    Hello J.F.,

    Thanks for your comments! I am continuing to find the Real World Haskell book to be useful, and Scala is on my future learning list (I play with Scala but do not really understand the language yet).

    I signed a Ruby book contract last week so for at least a few months I am concentrating on Ruby (which I have used professionally for years, but I am still in a learning mode; that said, I have been using Lisp for 25 years and still consider myself as a student of that language also :-)

    Best regards,
    Mark

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more