Re:A Parable by Dijkstra (1973)
by merijnv on Monday July 16, 2018 @05:25AM
(#17539842)
> Is Haskell still a preferred introductory language to enter the Functional Paradigm with?
I say yes, for a two reasons. 1) Enforced purity means you can't just fall back to your old imperative style as coding and use it as a crutch, and 2) it's the "most different" functional language, it will expose you to more than just functional programming and thus teach you more.
Learning Haskell will teach you: pure functional programming, algebraic datatypes, laziness, and ML-style types. All of which are worthwhile imo.
ML-style typing and algebraic datatypes you could also learn in F#/Ocaml/SML, but pure FP and laziness are two things that are very much worth learning and only apply to a handful of languages. And of that handful Haskell is really the only one with an ecosystem and community that makes it practical to write actual projects in.
I say yes, for a two reasons. 1) Enforced purity means you can't just fall back to your old imperative style as coding and use it as a crutch, and 2) it's the "most different" functional language, it will expose you to more than just functional programming and thus teach you more.
Learning Haskell will teach you: pure functional programming, algebraic datatypes, laziness, and ML-style types. All of which are worthwhile imo.
ML-style typing and algebraic datatypes you could also learn in F#/Ocaml/SML, but pure FP and laziness are two things that are very much worth learning and only apply to a handful of languages. And of that handful Haskell is really the only one with an ecosystem and community that makes it practical to write actual projects in.