Learning Haskell inch by inch

I did some more Haskell reading over the long weekend, mostly from Yet Another Haskell Tutorial*. There is definitely some challenging stuff (the Monads chapter in A Gentle Introduction to Haskell begins, ‘This section is perhaps less “gentle” than the others…’).

Overall, though, the combination of elegance and power and consistency in Haskell is very satisfying. The language has very little to apologize for.

I’m not really able to write much code yet, but I’ve started to be able to read it. I’m playing with adding Haskell coloring to dpaste, via the HsColour colorizing engine (written in Haskell, naturally). In trying to track down some formatting glitches – which may well turn out to be in my code, not theirs – I was actually able to look at the HsColour source and kind of understand how it does its thing.

I meant it when I said this was a project for the year – I know there will be stretches where I just have to put it down in order to get other things done. But it looks like I’m going to have no regrets.

* Unrelated to programming, but it’s awfully sad that the current top Google hit for “YAHT” is a page full of boat pictures.