Kevin's Weblog

I’ve spent a modest amount of time in the last week starting to learn Haskell. Basically, I’ve read about half of A Gentle Introduction to Haskell and bits of various other tutorials, and I’ve coded solutions to the first 20 of 99 Haskell Problems, and completed Lab 1 of Caltech CS 11: Haskell Track. So far, nothing has been particularly strenuous. Actually, the toughest thing was figuring out how to address the problem of GHCI refusing to print my user-defined datatypes (and, as I was writing this and flipping through other materials, I realized that I did this the hard way, which is good because I was going to complain bitterly about it otherwise).

Some random thoughts and observations:

• Integers vs. Ints — This makes me sad
• I really like the property of the ML family of languages that almost all the time, once your code compiles, it runs correctly (assuming you actually understand the problem you’re trying to solve).
• I’m still a little unclear on the best way to unit test Haskell code. I haven’t found a good tutorial on this yet. I’m also a little annoyed that there’s no haddock for HUnit. It seems like a real sign of immaturity in a language to ship something in the standard distribution with no documentation.
• Soon, I should start reading one of the actual books about the language, but I haven’t decided which yet. Also, I need to come up with some real-life problems to try solving with Haskell, to get a better feel for its practical strengths and weaknesses.