Haskell why learn

But it certainly helps. In simple terms, monads are abstraction that allow structuring programs generically. It essentially provides a way to use imperative programming in functional programming. Monad is a type class in Haskell. So you can use it to define basic operations and functions for those instances. They allow you to structure a program by describing computations as sequences of steps, and they handle side effects too.

Many questions about functional programming are answered by the comp. We recommend installing the Haskell Platform. Below there are links to certain introductory material. If you want to dig deeper, see Books and tutorials. There are several websites where you can enter a Haskell program and run it. They are in no particular order :. Our emails are on the main page. Unlike some modern languages, Haskell is not a language you will pick up in two days and then be able to write your homework 10x faster in.

Haskell will make you sweat to write simple programs, but it can also make writing things you thought were really complex quite a bit simpler. Mostly, it's a good learning experience since the patterns and ways of thinking you develop will serve you in any computer science work you do. Find some articles or blog posts about "Why Haskell" and try to get an idea of what the Haskell world is like.

Some good places to start are listed on the page Why Functional Programming. We recommend GHC for its power and flexibility. It seems to be the de-facto standard, so using it will give you the same platform as most online tutorial writers. One last option to check out is Try Haskell. It's an online, interactive interpreter with limited functionality that can be useful if you don't want to install anything.

Note: it's currently in alpha, and only offers a subset of the language. To make the most of the code examples you find, you should set up a good editor environment for yourself. We tend to use emacs and vim. In emacs, haskell-mode lets you automatically load ghci and evaluate your whole file just by typing C-c C-l. If you prefer vim, you'll probably want one terminal running vim and a second running ghci.

You can use :r to reload a file once it's loaded into ghci. GHCI is kind of weird. I said it. But, it's weird because it's awesome. As you start studying Haskell you'll soon find out all about the distinction between writing code "in a monad" and writing code outside of one.

Consider this section to be your warning that GHCI is a little strange. Before you dive into the details, we think it will serve you to have a basic understanding of some common functional idioms , mostly for dealing with lists of data.

This tend to show up frequently in Haskell code, and if you're used to for loops, you might be caught off guard. These are all examples of functional programming's verb-centric style.

First of all, Haskell does have arrays, but they're almost never a good idea. Almost everything is done with lists, which are primitives in the language. Even strings are just lists of characters, so any list function is equally applicable to a string. So how do you iterate over your non-arrays and do things?