One Language a Year: Haskell - update 1

So one month in and so far Haskell is treating me much better than Smalltalk did a year ago. What is better? Well to start with my main learning period is a 20 to 30 minute window each morning before work. For whatever reason Smalltalk put me directly to sleep and I would often literally find my forehead mashed into my keyboard. I haven't had that problem at all yet with Haskell. One thing is for sure, if you want to learn a new programming language, you have to be awake.

What is the difference? For one it may just be that I like functional rather than object oriented thinking better. I'm fairly comfortable with object design ideas, but things like design patterns more often than not seem like bandaids over language problems rather than powerful solution cookie cutters. Also I admit that I generally expect object based solution to be over engineered. There is such a thing as beautiful OO solutions, but they seem to be the exception in my experience.

But probably the number one success factor for me is the fantastic book: Real World Haskell. 4 chapters in and I find the pacing quite nice. And there is no shying away from mundane things like reading and writing files and reading command line arguments. I swear I have a Haskell book that doesn't do any discussion of IO until chapter 17. I get that IO is about monads and monads are serious mind benders, but you still need to crank out a "Hello World" program early on. RWH gets that and many other things right.

One of my main rules for making sure I understand everything as I'm going along is to retype in *all* code from scratch as I come across it and to do so without directly copying it. In other words I have to understand it enough to retype it in directly from memory. This is probably something I should always have done, but cutting and pasting is just so easy and there is so little time....

In any case, the year of Haskell is doing quite nicely so far.