41–50 of 152 posts
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.
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.
Well it's fine for beginners, because beginners want easy explanations and many examples to start with, instead of very precise definitions which requires a precise math vocabulary.
Still 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 think one of the most important things I learned from functional programming was how to consider and handle purity and side effects. Not necessarily by wrapping everything in IO monads in my non-functional code or anything like that. But trying to keep bits of business logic in pure functions (where possible, of course) sure makes my job easier.
Earlier 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?
Fairly sure it was recommended in here in the past and that's how I came to know it, can't give credit because I sadly don't remember.
[1]https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html
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.
While LYAH may not be ideal, isn't calling it "terrible" a tad too harsh?
FWIW I learned Haskell using LYAH and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was my first time learning a language with such a high focus on functional programming, but I think this book did a good job of teaching it.
I know this book isn't really popular (reading these comments) but to me it holds a lot of emotional value and I felt obligated to share my experience. I'll always be grateful for what this book taught me, and thankful to Miran for writing it.
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.
Some chapters are really basic and easy to read (like the chapter on recursion), and others are insanely dense and thick and basically unintelligible the first time through (like the chapter on functors).
We tried reading it for a book club once, and the weeks with the easy chapters there was no discussion to be had and the weeks with the difficult chapters ended up being "did anyone understand any of this?" and trying to figure it out together - which was somewhat helpful, but the book just really ended up being an excuse for us to learn together and not a resource in and of itself.