Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

by tosh • 8 years ago

322 145 8 years ago

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 internet.

So I took a follow-up "class" where we just implemented projects in the functional languages of our choice, and I chose to do everything in Haskell. I asked my research advisor (I work in a PL research lab) for guidance, and that's when Haskell really started to make sense for me. I'm not sure why LYAH wasn't good for me, when it's touted as being a great starting place for so many people, but now Haskell is one of my favorite languages by far.

BoiledCabbage• 8 years ago

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 seem to be unsuccessful with it.

There are better options out there.

neon_electro• 8 years ago

What would you recommend?

microtonal• 8 years ago

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.

hexane360• 8 years ago

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?

FearNotDaniel• 8 years ago

I had a very similar experience with the "Poignant Guide To Ruby" back in the day. It had an enormous cult following, it's a charming piece of programming-themed art, and probably did a lot to encourage people to want to learn the language, but I found it wasn't actually very practical as a tool for learning.

sevensor2• 8 years ago

I've bounced off LYAH more than once because it spends so much time in the REPL. I'm not interested in the REPL as an end in itself, only insofar as it can help me develop an actual program. Outside of image-based environments, what you do in the interactive shell doesn't reflect how actual code gets written. It feels trivial, and it doesn't help you build up a library of examples to refer back to later.

3rdAccount3• 8 years ago

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

jSherz• 8 years ago

Are there any similar resources with practical examples (other than the book Real World Haskell)?

ghayes• 8 years ago

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.

bor0• 8 years ago

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.

tirumaraiselvan• 8 years ago

I concur. LYAH may be seen as an intuitive and easy read for getting started but I felt I was incapable of understanding real Haskell code with just that background. I finally got my hands dirty by hacking around on existing Haskell code which is when things started making sense.

khannate2• 8 years ago

Based 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.

gh02t• 8 years ago

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.

s_dev• 8 years ago

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", "state", "formal methods", "parrallellism" are concepts that functional programming makes you reconsider from a new perspective.

dvlsg2• 8 years ago

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.

archarios• 8 years ago

Yeah but you don't have to learn Haskell to understand that

Barrin92• 8 years ago

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.

jmaa• 8 years ago

I'm with you on Functional Languages being solid and useful, I've done quite a lot of work in Standard ML, but the parent's point wasn't only do it for the education, it was at least do it for the education.

kthielen• 8 years ago

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, [...]

Unfortunately there are some places where aspects of the standard infrastructure around Haskell block production application.

In particular, we have applications with very hard latency requirements and also with complex type/binding requirements (where a direct structural type system is needed):

https://github.com/Morgan-Stanley/hobbes

ilovecaching5• 8 years ago

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.

0xCMP• 8 years ago

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)

mesarvagya• 8 years ago

Thanks just bought it.

btmiller• 8 years ago

I have to echo this sentiment because LYAH came across as foreign and generally unhelpful. It seems that in educators' pursuits to make CS more accessible to a wider audience, this becomes one example of how not to do it.

dustingetz• 8 years ago

I loved it!

sbjs• 8 years ago

As unfortunate as that may be, I'm glad to hear that maybe it's not that I can't learn Haskell, maybe it's just that I chose the wrong book. So here's to trying again with Hutton's book!

3rdAccount3• 8 years ago

HaskellBook is also highly recommended

reificator2• 8 years ago

I got LYAH in a Humble Bundle and didn't make it very far before getting bored and dropping it.

I've used Rust, SML, and a bit of Scala so I don't feel like it should be that difficult to pick up Haskell. Next time I get the urge, I'll try Hutton's book.

leshow3• 8 years ago

It probably won't be for you. I was picking up Rust in 2015 and my prior Haskell knowledge (just past beginner at the time), helped immensely. There's a good deal of crossover for the broad concepts.

ahartmetz• 8 years ago

Yeah, it tries to be funny but it's just annoying and disorganized.

gaius• 8 years ago

I felt the same about “Why’s poignant guide”

anon335dtzbvc• 8 years ago

"LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies."

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.

ilovecaching5• 8 years ago

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.

dom96• 8 years ago

Terrible book.

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.

wgerard• 8 years ago

Seconding this opinion. Haven't read Graham Hutton's book, but LYAH was just really poorly structured IMO.

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.

aap_• 8 years ago

Agreed, Hutton's book is really cool. I found LYAH just boring.

solomatov• 8 years ago

May be this book isn't ideal, but it explain the most important and complicated things in haskell such as Functors, Monads, Applicatives, etc.

samsonradu• 8 years ago

Thanks, will give it a shot. I got stuck with the implementation of State monads while reading LYAH probably due to the older code samples (State vs StateT). The explainations were however quite easy to grasp and I believe I assimilated some good general coding practices while reading through.

jbritton• 8 years ago

Personally, I found LYAH to be a great book. If there are places where the book is incorrect, I didn't have the background knowledge to notice. I felt the book did a good job explaining applicatives and monads by starting at the very basics and very slowly ramping up the complexity to a complete understanding. I know with many math books I have had a problem where some transformation morphs equation A into equation B and the reader is left wondering how exactly B was obtained. I never felt that way reading LYAH. I could see where somebody already knowledgeable with Haskell would find the micro steps overkill, but it went at the pacing I needed.

ilovecaching5• 8 years ago

Have you read Hutton's book?

hultner• 8 years ago

I used this book to get introduced to Haskell and think it worked great, it’s also used as the course material in the first programming course for the CS-Program at Chalmers University of Technology (CTH) and have worked as a introduction to programming for hundreds of students every year.

andrepd3• 8 years ago

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 and concise, with minimal fluff.

If anyone is familiar with it, Landau and Lifschitz is my kind of book ;)

EDIT: I've just skimmed the Hutton book. It looks great! That's what I mean. You don't have to be dense or incomprehensible or dry. Just stick to the point and explain as clear and concise as possible.

myegorov3• 8 years ago

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.

sriram_sun• 8 years ago

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

derefr2• 8 years ago

Like they're afraid to be serious for a moment (so many exclamation marks).

I rarely speak with enthusiasm... but teaching or explaining programming to people just gets me really, really excited. Putting myself in the shoes of a novice who is about to have some realization about the nature of an algorithm makes me shiver with anticipatory glee.

It's hard not to put that into my writing. It's not fake in the slightest—it's the only time I can let it shine through just how much I love this stuff, and it'd be fake to hide it. Even the constant "cute analogies" are part-and-parcel of this exuberance—symptoms of temporary hypomania brought about during the writing process.

Certainly, I could go back and edit all this stuff away. But, really, should I? I never had a role-model who was as excited about programming as I am. I wish I had had one. I, therefore, find it hard to restrain myself from being that person for others.

sridca4• 8 years ago

Hutton's book followed by something like https://intermediatehaskell.com/ should do the trick.

creichert• 8 years ago

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 doesn't make sense in one source, try referencing it in another source.

- When you have some experience writing programs in Haskell, refer to some older books like Real World Haskell. There may be a few issues compiling the examples, but nearly all the techniques in the book are still widely used and you learn about the language has progressed in the last few years. This gives you a compass to read and maintain older Haskell source code).

- Read as much Haskell code as you can from popular libraries (Pandoc, XMonad, and smaller libs as well).

ilovecaching5• 8 years ago

Beginners want a clear place to start learning from. All those things you said are overwhelming and unnecessary. Some of your recommendations would be fine as next steps, but to start with, just read Hutton's book. It is small enough to be read in just a few days.

dorkwood• 8 years ago

I think this is good advice for learning any topic in general. Learn from a diverse range of sources.

When I was first learning to code I can remember deciding to stick with one learning resource so as to not overwhelm myself. Eventually I hit a road block and wasn’t able to push past it. I blamed myself for not being able to understand what I was reading. I wasn’t smart enough.

When I tried again years later, instead of sticking with one resource I flicked between several different ones at once. Seeing how different people explained the same concept was extremely helpful in getting things to “click”.

f0rgot• 8 years ago

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

davelee• 8 years ago

Terrible opinion.

h4b4n3r0• 8 years ago

+1. I want a book that walks me through a real, well designed, functional (if you pardon the pun), useful piece of software, end to end. All these FP books are too enamored with language features, instead of showing you how a programmer proficient in the language would solve practical problems in it.

zZorgz• 8 years ago

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.

ionforce• 8 years ago

Many 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.

oalessandr• 8 years ago

Another good (imho better) option is the Haskell book https://haskellbook.com/

chasedehan• 8 years ago

Very good book! Definitely the best one out there

integricho• 8 years ago

It seems that it's development is stagnating, no visible updates for a long time, though I'm eagerly waiting for the release of it's final printed edition.

moomin• 8 years ago

I wouldn’t hold your breath. Julie stopped work on it a long time ago. It’s pretty good as is though.

leshow3• 8 years ago

The book is functionally complete. We're not waiting on any new chapters or anything. If you want a printed edition I wouldn't wait. The digital version is very good though.

zxexz• 8 years ago

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Very practical, and the way the chapters are organized really feels right. The excercises and examples really help drive the concepts home.

In my opinion, Learn You A Haskell is a poor resource to learn the language and for some readers seems to be actually counterproductive (I have two friends who got through LYAH and then tried actually using Haskell, realized they have no idea how to actually use the language, and give up on Haskell altogether :( If only they'd used The Haskell Book...)

vram222• 8 years ago

Currently:

This site can’t be reached haskellbook.com refused to connect.

HN readers hitting the site?

TheSmoke2• 8 years ago

http version is up and running. maybe it's just a certificate thing: http://haskellbook.com/

anon907412467• 8 years ago

Agreed. Now that I found I like org-mode plus org-babel-tangle I'm planning to re-read it solving the exercises.

LYAH however is a few days read. It lets you to get closer to start learning haskell, but not even in the same league.

sdinsn• 8 years ago

But it costs $59 dollars, and you don't have the option of buying a print book.

LYAH is more appealing for early learners, since it's free.

gilmi• 8 years ago

The Haskell wikibook[1] is a better free resource.

[1] https://wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

myegorov3• 8 years ago

Not to start a flame war, but imho this is my definition of a "terrible book". Of the everything and the kitchen sink variety. By contrast, I very much enjoyed LYAH, not least for its self-effacing humor. Hutton was too dry for me. There's a less well-known "Thinking Functionally with Haskell" book by Richard Bird that is concise and targets the mathematically inclined crowd.

thanatropism• 8 years ago

He of functional programming with bananas etc.?

fjsolwmv3• 8 years ago

Why is "everything and the kitchen sink" terrible? Thoroughness is appealing. You aren't obligated to read all of it.

sixstringbudha2• 8 years ago

It is something that is marketed very well. From the sample content, It didn't look interesting to me at all.

LYAH may not be the greatest Haskell tutorial. But it makes an easy read. That means, you are not afraid to go back to it again and again, Which is the crucial aspect of learning anything sufficiently complex or new or both..

sridca4• 8 years ago

I read more than half of this book, and sadly I did not enjoy it at all. Read it only if you enjoy long-winded verbose explanations. Hutton's or Bird's is concise yet explanatory.

djur2• 8 years ago

It was valuable to me as pretty much the only Haskell resource I read that addressed more complex concepts without hitting a point where they needed to resort to mathematics.

fjsolwmv3• 8 years ago

Does the verbosity interfere or can you skip over details you don't need?

appleflaxen• 8 years ago

for others that run into problems with the link: it does not work with https:// (at least for me)

Change it to http://www.haskellbook.com

mbroncano• 8 years ago

It doesn’t seem to be the most popular opinion around, but I must say I got back into FP (which I came to profoundly despise after completing my CS education) thanks to this book.

It’s certainly not a book for the profane, despite its approachable aspect.

leshow3• 8 years ago

Wouldn't be my first recommendation for a good Haskell book. I really enjoyed Haskell: first principles. I'm sure that will get mentioned a lot here.

Still, as a free resource it does cover some fun things. I just felt the book wasn't practical.

_ezrr• 8 years ago

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 studies with languages such as Emacs Lisp, Guile, Clojure, Elixir, Elm, Hy.

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.

dmix• 8 years ago

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).

mc_• 8 years ago

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

icc97• 8 years ago

to me it holds a lot of emotional value

For me too. I had some experience of FP and was also a PHP programmer. It's one of the funniest programming books I've ever read, references to Avril Lavigne amongst category theory appeals to my sort, but clearly it's not a book for everyone.

So I found it fun to learn and the concept of Applicative Functors in between Monoids and Monads has stuck. As well as the examples of monads, such as walking on a tight rope with birds landing either side.

I'm still not doing pure FP and so I forget much of the content, but its a pleasure to pick up and re-read.

jose_zap• 8 years ago

I wish this was shared less, it does a really bad job at teaching practical Haskell skills. For a long time this book left me with the feeling that I was unable to learn the language.

Oreb• 8 years ago

People have different styles of learning. I loved LYaHfGG, but hated Haskell Programming from First Principles. As is evident from this thread, many others feel the opposite way. Both books deserve to exist and be shared frequently.

Cieplak• 8 years ago

Haskell is hard, mainly because it's normally not a first language, and the first language people learn probably has Algol-like syntax (e.g. C, Java). I think Erlang is a bit easier to learn due to having fewer features, and for me was the gateway drug to Haskell. It let me learn to program with recursion instead of loops, and pattern matching instead of `if`s. The type system is the best part of Haskell, but unfortunately it makes it very easy to get stuck when starting out ("IO String" vs "String", "ByteString" vs "Text"). It's well worth the investment, though, to get a tool that lets you develop concise code like Python/Ruby but gives you strong guarantees of correctness. Also worth noting the incredible ecosystem of libraries and tooling, like stack and intero:

- https://docs.haskellstack.org

- https://commercialhaskell.github.io/intero/

rs86• 8 years ago

I don't think Haskell is hard, but that's once you know it. It takes a lot of insights until you can see that it is really simple. A lot of code can look unreadable but that's just until you become familiar with the idioms.

vapourismo• 8 years ago

I wouldn't really consider stack to be a great tool. There is Stackage which may be useful but the tool itself falls apart quickly when used to compile more than a single package executable.

That being said, one should have looked at these:

  - cabal Nix-style builds
  - ghicd for continuous type-checking
  - stylish-haskell for light code formatting
  - brittany for slightly more invasive code formatting
  - hlint for linting

wilsonfiifi• 8 years ago

What about "Get Programming with Haskell"[0] from Manning. Is it any good?

  [0]https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-haskell

Koshkin• 8 years ago

Yes, the book is true to its title.

Insanity• 8 years ago

I read LYAH and enjoyed it. But I did play around with Haskell a lot at the same time.

In addition, the IRC channel was immensely helpful along the way.

Nowadays I just use haskell for a few things at work or for toy projects, and the initial steps were taken with LYAH. (Beginner level though and I think I learned more from irc than the book in the end)

nanook• 8 years ago

What do people think of Real Word Haskell (http://book.realworldhaskell.org/) ?

lrc• 8 years ago

It's what I learned with. I thought it was pretty good, but I haven't tried any others. It gets you started, and seems best for a reader who knows a few other languages.

egl2019• 8 years ago

Excellent except that it is dated. GHC, libraries, and tooling have moved on in ten+ years. I would buy a new edition instantly.

Swizec• 8 years ago

I read LYAH a few years ago and I enjoyed it. These days I'd probably find it tries too hard to be funny, but that's me getting older, not the book getting worse.

It is very much written by a (young) 20-something targeting other 20-somethings with a similar sense of humor. Came out in 2011, which puts the author at 24 years old. So ... you know.

Went to high school with the dude for 4 years. He's cool.

miguelrochefort• 8 years ago

First programming book I've ever read. I love it. I haven't done Haskell since.

lolive2• 8 years ago

I won't comment the book. But my personal feeling is that you need a working environment first. And for that, you need to follow the advice at this resource: https://medium.com/@dogwith1eye/setting-up-haskell-in-vs-cod... with my comment (cf Olivier Rossel). If you are under Ubuntu, forget about the brew paragraph. Just curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh

After all that, you will have an editor that can run/debug some Haskell.

lolive2• 8 years ago

I will quote (what i think is) an important part of the learning process: "Much of the difficulty in learning a new language is simply setting up the environment and getting comfortable with the tools to start programming." Having a kind of IDE to play around was immenselly useful in my case. I then could try to solve small problem i invented. And used the various Haskell resources in a non-linear way (how to do this? Cf SO, books, articles, etc. And then some theory articles to tell you why it is done this way. And that again for another topic required to solve my problem, and again, and again). Problem solving was my way to go to discover the Haskell way. Not just reading a book linearly.

bribri• 8 years ago

I don't recommend Learn you a Haskell or Real World Haskell. Check out Haskell Programming from First Principles

allenleein• 8 years ago

Honestly, this is not a good book for beginner.

Here are some FREE Functional Programming (Haskell,Purescript)learning resources from 101 to building product: https://github.com/functionalflow/brains/projects/9

More, over 20 FREE FP books: https://github.com/allenleein/brains/tree/master/Zen-of-Func...

drngdds• 8 years ago

I got about 2/3rds through this and I didn't like the lack of exercises or real example programs.

scottmsul• 8 years ago

This is my all-time favorite Haskell resource: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

Just jump to the bottom and go through as many pages as possible. Going through Functors, Applicatives, and only then Monads puts everything in a broader context and makes Monads easier to understand.

PhantomBKB• 8 years ago

The Haskell Book was better for me at least.

dasil003• 8 years ago

It seems obvious to me that LYAH is an imitation of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, and that neither is actually a good learning resource. I don't mean to disparage these as works of art, but _why did it first, _why did it better, and if you actually want to learn either ruby or haskell neither should be your first stop.

thom• 8 years ago

Yeah, I'm as much a fan of whimsy as the next guy, but every language wanting one of these twee storybook intros is increasingly grating (Clojure has Clojure for the Brave and True etc).

dogweather• 8 years ago

LYAH also didn't do much for me.

I got started with Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook. As an experienced programmer, I LOVE the "cookbook" format. E.g., "Keeping and representing data from a CSV file" or "Examining a JSON file with the aeson package". If you need to actually USE the language, this is a great way to get started. Complete programs are shown.

Unfortunately, most books dive into the language _implementation_ instead of teaching its _interface_. (This probably points to a Haskell design weakness: deep learning of the impl. is nec. for success.)

But my REAL wish: Because I'm like many people and have experience with dozens of languages. I want books that leverage that knowledge and experience. E.g., to explain monads, just say it's an interface specification, and give the API. It'll make sense to me.

js82• 8 years ago

But my REAL wish: Because I'm like many people and have experience with dozens of languages. I want books that leverage that knowledge and experience. E.g., to explain monads, just say it's an interface specification, and give the API. It'll make sense to me.

I understand the wish but I personally believe it is a bad idea. I think Haskell is just too different due to purity and laziness and trying to adapt your intuitions from imperative programming is going to mostly fail, badly. I suggest it's better to approach Haskell with a completely blank mind and learn the correct intuitions through just being very rigorous at the beginning.

I have written a bit of Haskell myself but I still get surprised by evaluation order, for example. But it has paid off, I think, it's a lot more understandable and modular and beautiful code that I write in Haskell than elsewhere.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

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