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Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

learnyouahaskell.com

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Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#101

Post by svat »

aye01 wrote: post #81
ilovecaching wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graham has simple and precise definitions. They're not mutually exclusive properties. No mathematical background or vocabulary is required to read Grahams book. The book is used in introductory computer science courses for undergraduate freshman.

i have never heard of haskell being a language used for teaching introductory computer science courses. that sounds like a nightmare. i'd imagine mid-to-upper div classes.

Haskell was the first programming language taught at our college when I was a student, where some of the students hadn't even used a computer before. It went fine. (I think it was actually better than other languages would have been, as many of the students had a background in mathematics and might have been confused by things like "x = x + 1", while they were comfortable with the idea of a function, at least as used in mathematics.)

If you'd like to see for yourself what that course was like, here are lecture notes (and assignments, and mid-term exam): https://www.cmi.ac.in/~madhavan/courses/programming08/index....

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#102

Post by f0rgot »

creichert wrote: post #79
ilovecaching wrote: post #11

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. Definitely overstated and not good advice for beginners. My advice to beginners would be: - Read all the Haskell books available at your disposal. (In addition to LYAH and the Hutton book, I would say Learning Haskell From First Principles and Get Programming with Haskell are great, https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-haskell , http://haskellbook.com/ ) - When you hit something that do…

It is uncanny how close to my own experience the process you just described is.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#104

Post by hexane360 »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #6
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #2

I 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…

>Majority of people I anecdotally hear gave up on Haskell seem to mention LYAH

This is a bad statistic to use on its own. Imagine if I said "Majority of people I anecdotally hear gave up on web development seem to mention HTML". See the problem?

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#105

Post by ChristianGeek »

sulam wrote: post #55
wmfiv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another entry in the not Haskell category, Functional Programming in Scala is outstanding.

Yes, this book is one I recommend to anyone who wants to really understand functional programming. Admittedly it's not Haskell, but it's the book I wished I'd had back when I first learn FP (and Scala).

It lost me about 2/3 in when it got to monads.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#106

Post by dmix »

_ezrr wrote: post #46

LYAH was my first taste of functional programming. Before that I only had 2-3 years of experience using PHP and Ruby. I read this book and quickly fell in love with FP and category theory, for the first time really started to enjoy programming to the fullest. This book is also the reason I was able to land a job as an Erlang developer, and teach a little bit of Haskell to others. Now, 5 years later, I continue my stu…

What are you building with Erlang? If you don't mind sharing. I always love hearing about it being used in production... Usually it's used in interesting ways. Unfortunately not to many jobs available (not that I've tried very hard to find one).

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#107

Post by thisrod »

aye01 wrote: post #81
ilovecaching wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graham has simple and precise definitions. They're not mutually exclusive properties. No mathematical background or vocabulary is required to read Grahams book. The book is used in introductory computer science courses for undergraduate freshman.

i have never heard of haskell being a language used for teaching introductory computer science courses. that sounds like a nightmare. i'd imagine mid-to-upper div classes.

In the mid 90s, first year computer science at the Australian National University used Miranda, the proprietary language from which Haskell was forking at the time. It was great. When I read SICP later, the first half seemed like a long-winded demonstration of obvious ways to use recursion. Didn't everyone know this stuff?

Much of the language seemed like magic, but ANU had a culture of throwing students in the deep end to keep us humble about what we knew.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#108

Post by zZorgz »

ilovecaching wrote: post #11

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.

I must be out of the loop or this is the first I've seen this (free!) book so widely criticized. I thought it was pretty good for getting me interested in the language.

Then again, Hutton's book seems legitimately criticized too for beginners looking at the reviews I'm seeing on Amazon with some preferring or suggesting LYAH as a needed complement. So to each their own.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#109

Post by almostdeadguy »

neon_electro wrote: post #8
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #6

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?

Easily the best one IMO: http://haskellbook.com/ . Unlike LYAH it covers stuff that is actually important to writing real haskell programs like testing code, managing effects via monad transformers, etc.

Also this is one of the best references while you're learning (not good as a tutorial, but chock full of invaluable resources): http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/ . TBH I wish every language had an equivalent of this guide.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#110

Post by djur »

neon_electro wrote: post #8
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #6

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?

Haskell Programming From First Principles is costly but extremely good: http://haskellbook.com/

The beginner material in the Haskell WikiBook is pretty solid: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

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