Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
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Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#12I tried LYAH before I had any real functional experience, and it went poorly. I think I wasn't dedicated enough. I took a programming languages class taught in Racket, and by the end of that semester I felt like I had finally "gotten" what functional programming was all about. Tried LYAH again and... it still didn't quite stick. Not sure why. But I was determined, because I'd heard about Haskell so much on the intern…
Are there any similar resources with practical examples (other than the book Real World Haskell)?
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure why LYAH wasn't good for me, when it's touted as being a great starting place It's not. It's a terrible starting resource. Majority of people I anecdotally hear gave up on Haskell seem to mention LYAH. Yes the material is there, but it's not presented in a way that generally sticks and fits pieces together. I guarantee someone will reply to this thread and say it worked for them, but in general people…
What would you recommend?
I'm not OP and it's not haskell, but fsharpforfunandprofit.com really clicked for me, personally.
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#14Still recall the advice form a classmate asking if I should learn Haskell -- he said "Just learn it because it'll change how you think about programming". I think people should learn it for this exact reason -- it really does change how you program as well as thinking about programming even if on a daily basis you're not writing pure Haskell or Clean or Scheme or whatnot. Common programming concepts like "iteration",…
I always think that this attitude is a little bit off. Obviously learning a new paradigm or a new language is great and expanding your horizon is very rarely bad, but I feel a little bit sad about shoehorning Haskell, or functional languages in general, still into this education category.
Haskell is a very solid production language and you can put industrial grade software in Haskell out there, and it is in fact used by a fairly serious amount of companies at this point.
Instead of just taking Haskell features and porting them into already adopted languages, I'd really like to see more companies just go directly with Haskell, or Clojure, or Ocaml and F#. It does work.
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#15Many years after my first exposure to this book and having learned more heavy-FP in Scala, I would not recommend this as a resource for learning either FP or Haskell.
But let that not be a pock on the overall great mission to make FP more accessible.
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#16I tried LYAH before I had any real functional experience, and it went poorly. I think I wasn't dedicated enough. I took a programming languages class taught in Racket, and by the end of that semester I felt like I had finally "gotten" what functional programming was all about. Tried LYAH again and... it still didn't quite stick. Not sure why. But I was determined, because I'd heard about Haskell so much on the intern…
> I'm not sure why LYAH wasn't good for me, when it's touted as being a great starting place It's not. It's a terrible starting resource. Majority of people I anecdotally hear gave up on Haskell seem to mention LYAH. Yes the material is there, but it's not presented in a way that generally sticks and fits pieces together. I guarantee someone will reply to this thread and say it worked for them, but in general people…
I think the enthusiasm for LYAH should also be seen in context.
Real World Haskell was the first book that made it to a wider audience. And while was is full of useful information, it is a very uneven book that works badly as an introduction to Haskell. We once had a reading group where we read RWH, most colleagues dropped out after the first 3-4 chapters.
In comparison, LYAH was a book that was far more straightforward as an introduction. And I know a few people that have gone through it cover to cover.
Although it's been a while since I read it, I really liked Graham Hutton's 'Programming in Haskell'. It was short & clear.
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#17Based on my experiences using this as a reference while taking a class on functional programming, I think that while many of the explanations and examples are helpful, the ordering is a bit weird. For example, pushing off the explanation of higher-order functions for so long seems questionable, since they're a fundamental feature of the language.
I agree, it's really disjointed. It spends a long time on relatively easy stuff and not much time on the hard things, IMO. I also have trouble with the style and I think it goes too far with the sort of informal, conversational tone. Ultimately Haskell is a language with a lot of formality at its core. You don't have to present it as all abstract category theory theorems and such, but that doesn't mean you should avoid formality entirely.
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#18I tried LYAH before I had any real functional experience, and it went poorly. I think I wasn't dedicated enough. I took a programming languages class taught in Racket, and by the end of that semester I felt like I had finally "gotten" what functional programming was all about. Tried LYAH again and... it still didn't quite stick. Not sure why. But I was determined, because I'd heard about Haskell so much on the intern…
I really enjoyed programming in Elm as a starting point. Elm avoids type-classes, which tend to be the biggest hurdle when starting to learn Haskell. Plus, you can design a nice web app in the process (versus, say, process CSV files). After I became comfortable with Elm, learning Haskell, type-classes, lazy evaluation, etc., made significantly more sense to me. For instance, `do` syntax is great, but it's not obvious what it really is doing, at first, unless you've programmed pure functional languages without using `do`.
Also, learning Idris is another great learning exercise if you want to stretch the ways to think about programming.
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#19Another good (imho better) option is the Haskell book https://haskellbook.com/
Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
#20Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.
Yes and there is a newer 2016 version (2007 one came up for me first) https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Haskell-Graham-Hutton-ebo...
(no referral link)