Introduction - Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
About this tutorial Welcome to Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! If you're reading this, chances are you want to learn Haskell. I decided to write this because I wanted to solidify my own knowledge of Haskell and because I thought I could help people new to Haskell learn it from my perspective. This tutorial is aimed at people who have experience in imperative programming languages (C, C++, Java, Python …) but haven't programmed in a functional language before (Haskell, ML, OCaml …). The channel #haskell on the freenode network is a great place to ask questions if you're feeling stuck. I failed to learn Haskell approximately 2 times before finally grasping it because it all just seemed too weird to me and I didn't get it. So what's Haskell? Haskell is a purely functional programming language. Haskell is lazy. Haskell is statically typed. Haskell is elegant and concise. Haskell was made by some really smart guys (with PhDs). What you need to dive in A text editor and a Haskell compiler.
Excellent Overview of Functional Programming
14 Feb 2008 I just ran into an article on DZone that totally threw me off my chair in terms of content. It’s titled (ambitiously enough) “Functional Programming For the Rest of Us“. It’s worth noting that the author claims to be presenting his explanations in Java, but is in fact devising an extension of Java to represent FP constructs more concisely. The really interesting bit is how the author motivates FP through a combination of real-world examples and lengthy reasoning. So grab yourself a cup of coffee and a box of donuts (it’ll take you about that long to finish the article), and slog your way through.
Hackage: Introduction
Can Your Programming Language Do This?
by Joel Spolsky Tuesday, August 01, 2006 One day, you're browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they're exactly the same, except that one block refers to "Spaghetti" and one block refers to "Chocolate Moose." // A trivial example: alert("I'd like some Spaghetti!") These examples happen to be in JavaScript, but even if you don't know JavaScript, you should be able to follow along. The repeated code looks wrong, of course, so you create a function: function SwedishChef( food ) { alert("I'd like some " + food + "!") OK, it's a trivial example, but you can imagine a more substantial example. Now you notice two other blocks of code which look almost the same, except that one of them keeps calling this function called BoomBoom and the other one keeps calling this function called PutInPot. alert("get the lobster"); PutInPot("lobster"); PutInPot("water"); alert("get the chicken"); BoomBoom("chicken"); BoomBoom("coconut"); Look! Ok. Next:
The Scala Programming Language
Roundup: Scala for Java Refugees
13 Feb 2008 To be honest, I’m somewhat kicking myself for writing this post. As I’ve said many times: roundup posts are for people who are too lazy to write real content. I can’t tell you how many blogs I’ve come across which have a roundup-to-post ratio of easily 3:1. You know it’s a bad sign when sites start having roundups of their roundups… Meta-roundups aside, I decided (after much deliberation) that a single post linking to all six parts of the series would be useful to one or two people. Of course it’s always possible that you subscribe to my way of looking at things. Part 1: main(String[]) Introductory article giving motivation for learning Scala and some first steps to “get your feet wet” in the language. Part 2: Basic OOP Looking at Scala’s syntax in a little more detail. Part 3: Methods and Statics Scala’s method syntax is far too powerful to cover in a single post. Part 4: Pattern Matching and Exceptions Part 5: Traits and Types Part 6: Getting Over Java
Why Scala?
Before answering the question of "Why Scala?", we first need to answer the question "what is Scala?" From the Scala website, the following overview can be found: Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. Scala is object-oriented: Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. For some developers, these incentives will be enough to lure you away from Java into the Scala world. So, once again, "why Scala?" In a post titled "Scala: The best of both Ruby and Java", Ian describes that it might not be a choice between Java and Scala, but instead the choice to use a combination of Java and Scala as an alternative to other language choices such as Ruby: Many programmers love Ruby, they just can’t get enough of it. Continuing on, Ian notes that: Scala's far from perfect.
