
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Haskell - davidw
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1974033854;fp;;fpid;;pf;1
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parenthesis
Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=309347>

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quasimojo
haskell is one to learn. budget at least a year of spare time to relearn. i am
dumber than most so i have been going at it two years now, and i still learn
new things every time i visit the haskell wiki.

why haskell? because functional languages are the future. why? because the von
neumann architecture is giving way to parallelism, be it hadoop/mapreduce, or
a thirty-two way multicore processor under your desk. read herb sutter's "end
of the free lunch". any way you slice it, tools that address slicing up
problems better across arrays of resources are the future. who knows, maybe
(likely) java etc will incorporate this stuff. its no coincidence that haskell
shows up in the google mapreduce tutorial.

learning haskell isn't easy, you basically have to relearn everything, and it
is often confusing. but once you do, you will be five years ahead of your
peers

~~~
olavk
I'm trying to lean Haskell. Again. First time I thought it would be easy. "I
can learn any language in a week" I thought - as long as it is Python or Java
or something closely resembling, it turned out. Gave up fairly quickly.

Second time I was serious, invested a significant amount of time, but still
gave up when I reached monads.

Then I taught myself scheme and worked my way through SICP, just to be better
prepared. Now I'm trying again, and it makes a little more sense, but I'm
still stuck at monad transformers.

If someone can learn Haskell in a week I hate them. And I hate all monad
tutorials. "Monads are easy, they are just like a conveyor belt" "No, they are
just like a spacesuit!" "Monads are like a box of apples, that magically
transforms into a box of oranges!" "No, its easy: Monads are just like green
monsters whits eats values, but when you kill the monsters they puke the
values out again - you could have invented them yourselves! Perhaps you
already have!"

