Saturday, December 27, 2008

Functional Programming

I've harbored a secret desire to learn Haskell for a few years now. Simon Peyton-Jones is one of the key people behind Haskell. His web site at MSR has tons of papers, a tutorial on concurrent programming in Haskell, and a video lecture of A taste of Haskell. There's also a Simon Peyton-Jones podcast at SE-Radio.

What is Haskell

Haskell is a programming language that is

  • purely functional
  • lazy
  • higher order
  • strongly typed
  • general purpose

Why should I care?

Functional programming will make you think differently about programming

  • Mainstream languages are all about state
  • Functional programming is all about values

Whether or not you drink the Haskell Kool-Aid, you'll be a better programmer in whatever language you regularly use

I should read a Haskell book or two, and, in related functional goodness, I keep reading how great Practical Common Lisp is. I also need to fulfill my quest to finish SICP. I've read the first three chapters twice, doing the examples once in Scheme and again in OCAML. I've read chapter 4 on interpreters. I need to work through the examples in that chapter and take in the final fifth chapter.

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