Re:What I wish a Ruby programmer had told me one year ago..
by trebor on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @08:46AM
(#1301389)
Breaking out of a programming paradigm is difficult, but one of the most liberating things that you can do. Now when you go back to working on PHP projects you can approach it with different methods. The roughest time I had breaking my paradigm was when I learned a little Lisp...
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Re:What I wish a Ruby programmer had told me one year ago..
by dagheti on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @09:45AM
(#1301510)
If found working in a ML language like Haskell or F# puts a really tight straight-jacket on code style, and is wonderful at forcing you to adopt a new paradigm.
When you go back to coding in other languages, you approach the same problems in different ways because you were forced to solve them in a strongly typed functional manner.
Re:What I wish a Ruby programmer had told me one year ago..
by silentbicycle on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @04:30PM
(#1302609)
Yeah, and after you're comfortable with ML or Haskell, try Prolog. Unification+backtracking is like pattern matching cranked to 12. As a bonus, a lot of the corners of Erlang will suddenly make more sense, and several Prolog implementations come with good libraries for constraint programming.
Also, not to nitpick, but Haskell isn't an ML dialect, and while my experience is with OCaml (not SML or F#), OCaml doesn't force you to do anything in a purely functional manner the way Haskell does - it just makes it an option. (I think this is a good thing, but I guess it's a downside when you're trying to force yourself to try new stuff.)