GHC 7.8.1 released • Hacker News Board

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#31

Post by tel » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 4:59 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #21

I really want to get into Haskell, but I just don't understand it. The tutorial on the official site doesn't do it for me. Can anyone suggest alternative resources for learning? I'm used to C-like languages. Thanks for all the responses. I'll start with LYAH.

Others have linked tutorials. I'm going to leave some advice: pretend like you're learning to program from scratch. Not just mentally but in how you invest. It will likely take some amount of time, it will likely happen in stages of progressively receding complete astonishment and confusion, and you will be served to be proud of silly things like getting simple programs to even compile.

Sounds kind of miserable, right?

That's why you should also prepare for it with some of that early curiosity and wonder that drove us all to learn programming to begin with.

Haskell is probably unlike anything you've used before.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#32

Post by efnx » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #21

I really want to get into Haskell, but I just don't understand it. The tutorial on the official site doesn't do it for me. Can anyone suggest alternative resources for learning? I'm used to C-like languages. Thanks for all the responses. I'll start with LYAH.

After LYAH I learned a lot from doing as many of the 99problems set for Haskell as possible.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/H-99:_Ninety-Nine_Haskell...

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#33

Post by tel » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

reirob wrote: post #9

[..] http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.8.1/html/users_guide/type-... [..] This extension allows programmers to use the list notation for construction of structures like: Set, Map, IntMap, Vector, Text and Array. The following code listing gives a few examples: ['0' .. '9'] :: Set Char [1 .. 10] :: Vector Int [("default",0), (k1,v1)] :: Map String Int ['a' .. 'z'] :: Text http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.8.1/html/use…

Woah! I did not know that was going to be included! Here's to hoping it makes as much a splash as OverloadedStrings did!

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#34

Post by dengnan » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #21

I really want to get into Haskell, but I just don't understand it. The tutorial on the official site doesn't do it for me. Can anyone suggest alternative resources for learning? I'm used to C-like languages. Thanks for all the responses. I'll start with LYAH.

When I learn something, I would like to simultaneously read several books on the same topic, so that I could learn same things from different perspective. It works great for me when I learn Haskell, Scala, and other things.

Here is the list of materials I used to learn Haskell:

1. LYAH, http://learnyouahaskell.com/

2. Real world Haskell: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/

3. Programming in Haskell: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Haskell-Graham-Hutton/dp/0... (No one suggests this book, but I do think this book is well-written and concise.)

4. Video tutorial by Erik Meijer based on Programming in Haskell: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Func...

5. Advanced topics: http://www.haskellforall.com/2014/03/introductions-to-advanc...

Edit: Format

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#35

Post by chowells » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

ciferkey wrote: post #20

Great! Can't wait until the next release of the Haskell Platform now.

Don't.

There's no benefit to handcuffing yourself to the platform. Just install ghc and cabal, and enjoy yourself.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#36

Post by izietto » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:10 PM UTC

I want to find a job as Haskell programmer!

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#37

Post by embwbam » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #21

I really want to get into Haskell, but I just don't understand it. The tutorial on the official site doesn't do it for me. Can anyone suggest alternative resources for learning? I'm used to C-like languages. Thanks for all the responses. I'll start with LYAH.

One thing to keep in mind: Haskell is different enough that it's almost as hard as learning to program the first time.

To learn something that hard, you need to be exposed to it multiple times. You'll probably get overwhelmed even with LYAH, but give it some time and come back to it.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#38

Post by lelf » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #21

I really want to get into Haskell, but I just don't understand it. The tutorial on the official site doesn't do it for me. Can anyone suggest alternative resources for learning? I'm used to C-like languages. Thanks for all the responses. I'll start with LYAH.

I can recommend reading SICP first if you know nothing about functional programming. It will likely help a lot. And forget everything you know from C-like languages (I'm not joking).

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#39

Post by thoughtpolice » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:18 PM UTC

swift wrote: post #16

I don't recall ever being excited about a compiler release before, but this has got me excited. Typed holes, overloaded lists, pattern synonyms, new IO manager, new code generator, interruptible FFI calls, parallel compilation, and tons of other new features. One thing I'm particularly excited about is the switch to use the system's dynamic linker instead of a custom one in GHCi. The custom linker GHCi used before di…

The dynamic switch isn't without its pain points. In particular, the way we currently implement it leaves some things to be desired, and it's lead to some other rather unfortunate ramifications for Windows right now.

Truthfully, me and Simon now have reservations about if this is the right way to go, and we should instead invest more infrastructure into our own Linker (which, independently, got some nice bug fixes this time around - constructors and weak pointers now work, for example.) ELF support is quite complete (and very stable) for example. It's just a question of what's the most work.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#40

Post by gregschlom » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:18 PM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #29

JoshTriplett wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell has one of the best FFIs I've ever seen; calling C code from Haskell is quite trivial, and you can write all of the necessary wrapper code and objects (such as automatic memory management or object destruction) in Haskell using common wrappers. I'd also highly recommend c2hs for writing new wrapper libraries.

Part of the problem is that iOS APIs tend to be Objective-C, which is somewhat harder to wrap in Haskell.

Not really, it's quite easy to call Objective-C methods (or more correctly, to send messages to Objective-C selectors) and perform other Objective-C-related tasks from C. See: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

This is actually what the Objective-C compiler does. It translates your Objective-C code to C method calls.