Posts tagged: HASKELL

In 2007, I took a whack at learning Haskell as my Language of the Year. It was an educational experience on more levels than I had expected. I didn’t get as far with the language as I might have hoped, but I did have the essential mind-opening experience of dealing with a purely functional, “lazy” language. My approach and style in my primary day-to-day language (Python) changed in a positive way. I really like Haskell and hope to continue playing, and possibly working, with it in the future.

Python has two seemingly similar sequence types, tuples and lists.

The difference between the two that people notice right away, besides literal syntax (parentheses vs. square brackets), is that tuples are immutable and lists are mutable. Unfortunately, because this distinction is strictly enforced by the Python runtime, some other more interesting differences in application tend to get overshadowed.

One common summary of these more interesting, if subtle, differences is that tuples are heterogeneous and lists are homogeneous. In other words:

Today’s notes will be a bit more free-form. Now that the tutorial days are over and the main conference has begun, there are more sessions – and less time to write!

Keynotes

Tim O’Reilly raised the question of openness beyond source code. This felt a bit amorphous, but he did have a good point that when software is a service, availability of source code is not the whole story – if Google gave you their source, you couldn’t do anything with it. I can’t decide whether this is a real insight or a “duh”.

That nifty feature Python stole from Haskell (or was it Erlang?), “list comprehensions”, is found in the latest version of Javascript (available in Firefox 2.0) under the name “array comprehensions”. Cool!

via John Resig.

This is exciting – three notable personalities from the Haskell world (Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen) have teamed up to write a new book on Haskell for O’Reilly. Even better, it will be published under a Creative Commons license and released chapter-by-chapter on their website.

For now all that’s on their new site is a blog, but that’s sure to change over the coming days and weeks.

http://www.realworldhaskell.org/

I suspect this will become the standard intro to Haskell for working programmers like myself. If only it had been available at the beginning of my year-of-trying-to-learn-Haskell!