Comments on: Haskell Eye for the Ruby Guy

By: Luca

Luca — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 11:12:50 +0000

I have been learning Haskell in my spare-time for a couple of months so far and have been reading "Yet another Haskell Tutorial" available here: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/docs/daume02yaht.pdf I think it's a very good book. It's worth reading. I think I really like this programming language and the whole functional programming approach.

By: Lorenzo

Lorenzo — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It would be really interesting to see a semantic comparison of Haskell vs. Ruby/Python that goes beyond the algorithmic trivias of quicksort implementations.

Something like solving a difficult problem and an ordinary problem (such as database web frontends).

By: Federico

Federico — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was about to decide which of these two functional languages pick as the next learning step. Now that I’ve read your article I’ll definitely go fo Haskell!
Thanks! 🙂

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with Federico; I was wondering which language to learn this year, and you helped me take the final choice!

By: David

David — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I read always your blog and I didn’t see this one coming. Now I feel the urge to check out Haskell right away. You’re inspiring as always.

By: Daco

Daco — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton is a good introductory new book.

By: Brian Yamabe

Brian Yamabe — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Does anyone know of Haskell being used in production? Are those who have been swayed to try Haskell doing so because it is the bigger challenge? I’m going with Erlang because of my interest in concurrency, its use in production, and the Pragmatic book (is it being called the Crosswalk book yet?).

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Brian,
“this wiki page”:http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry has some details about companies employing Haskell for commercial use. 🙂

By: sean

sean — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Lorenzo: Yeah! Maybe you could write a fibonacci function!! Or FizzBuzz!!! 😉

If you want a taste of what “real” Haskell code looks like, check out the source of Darcs, Pugs, or GHC.

By: emk

emk — Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more about concurrency. We’re going to have to deeply reconsider the way we think about mutable state.

Erlang is absolutely fascinating, and the new Pragmatic Press book is great. I can’t wait until the final chapters are written.

But like you, I’ve been focusing on Haskell lately. I’ve been impressed at how many neat ideas there are in Haskell, and how closely everything is tied to math.

Here are two cool things I learned recently:

* Map fusion: algebraic optimization
* Bayesian inference using monads

Now if only I could figure out how to build a reasonable monad DSL in Ruby!