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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

#121

Post by andrepd »

sriram_sun wrote: post #90
andrepd wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Personally I hate these kinds of books. This style, long-winded "cheery" explanations, constantly "playful", as if I was a small child that couldn't hold my attention for 2 minutes before you had to dangle a colourful toy in front of me. Like they're afraid to be serious for a moment (so many exclamation marks). I'm not here for humour, or to have a pleasant conversation. I'm here to learn. Just give me clear…

Can be cheery, playful and concise - The Little Schemer was a pleasure to read cover to cover.

I can vouch for that! It's more the endless faffing about and the distracting interruptions that irk me. In TLS the whimsy never got in the way of the learning.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#122

Post by andrepd »

zinclozenge wrote: post #94
myegorov wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect few physics students would agree with you about the didactic value of LL. The audiences for the two types of books couldn't be more different.

They're definitely not the books you want for your primary learning source, but as a 2nd source pretty good for sure as long as you're comfortable filling in computation details between equations.

I learned Mechanics and Fluid Dynamics from Landau ;) It's a challenge to be sure. And it's dense. But actually the fact they tell you the ideas but not necessarily every detail sorta forces you to work things out in paper as you read, which I found very fruitful.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#123

Post by sevensor »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #114
3rdAccount wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bothered me too. I use a REPL everyday, but you have to know how to write full programs too.

What book on any language shows you whole programs that couldn't be seen in repl (assuming a repl exists)

Off the top of my head, HtDP, despite being entirely presented within DrRacket, has you work through programs that you could just as well compile. Learn Python the Hard Way, as well as every other "Hard Way" book, makes a point of having you write entire programs. The Ocaml resource that was posted a week or two ago makes a point of deemphasizing the REPL.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#124

Post by nilkn »

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?

I learned Haskell from the "Gentle Introduction" (which isn't so gentle), then writing programs, reading documentation, and reading online discussions and threads.

https://www.haskell.org/tutorial/

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#125

Post by zadler »

bor0 wrote: post #76
ghayes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Learning Idris will definitely alter the way you think about programming and make you a better programmer, even if you don't program in it on a daily basis.

Can you give a little more info? Does it offer alot over Haskell?

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#126

Post by acjohnson55 »

ChristianGeek wrote: post #105
sulam wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's OK. You've already learned more than enough. My life in Scala was just fine once I understood that a monad was just a data type that admitted a flatmap operation.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#127

Post by acjohnson55 »

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?

Real World OCaml is great.

While not purely functional, I also recommend JacaScript Allongé.

Both are free online!

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#128

Post by marvy »

NateEag wrote: post #113
hexane360 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

HTML is by definition intrinsic to Web development. LYAH is not intrinsic to Haskell programming.

Let me try to make hexane360's point more explicitly:

Imagine a hypothetical universe where all Haskell books are equally good, but some are more popular than others (maybe they have well known authors, or catchy titles, or are available for free online, or something). In particular, imagine Haskell Book Number 7 (HB#7 for short) gets 99% "market share".

Then if someone says "most people who gave up on Haskell used this book", you should not conclude that it reflects badly on the book. It's just a consequence of the book being popular, so it's the one people tend to try to use, so it's "the one that didn't work for them".

If you want to learn whether the book is better or worse than average, you need to split people into two groups: one group used this book, the other group used some other book, and compare which group does better. (Ideally, you should assign people to a group based on a coin flip, but even just looking at what happens "naturally" without your interference is better than nothing.)

Back to our non-hypothetical universe: LYAH does not have 99% market share, but it's pretty popular. I heard of it, and I've never looked for a book on Haskell. So to some extent the same logic applies.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#129

Post by mc_ »

dmix wrote: post #106
_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).

We use Erlang to build Kazoo (https://github.com/2600hz/kazoo). In production since 2011, deployed around the world in various clusters.
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