Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell

Re:Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell by tel on Saturday April 05, 2014 @02:41PM (#7537997)

While LYAH is a lot of fun, if you've gotten your feet wet with Haskell for a while and want to see some really powerful examples of "functionally solving problems" I cannot recommend more highly Richard Bird's "Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design"[0].

All of the "Functional Pearls" papers are worth a read, but Bird's book is such a compressed, convenient, powerful collection of advanced functional problem solving style that I think anyone interested in "thinking" functionally should strive to read it.

It's not exactly for the faint of heart, to be clear. Bird's idea is that we can establish certain mathematical rules which allow us to transform "the simplest thing which could possibly be correct" to an efficient program through a series of steps, each one maintaining correctness as an invariant.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Ric...

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Re:Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell by dfan on Saturday April 05, 2014 @03:59PM (#7538227)

Heartily seconded.

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Re:Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell by sordina on Sunday April 06, 2014 @12:32AM (#7539754)

The majority of this book is also highly portable. The techniques can be applied across languages very easily, although, the Haskell implementations are very elegant.

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Re:Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell by tel on Sunday April 06, 2014 @01:45AM (#7539939)

I would say that's true in so far as your language you're porting to has a preponderance of pure functionality and notions of real mathematical "variables". Without those it'll be hard to get any semblance of equational reasoning to work out.

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Re:Functionally Solving Problems With Haskell by dcre on Sunday April 06, 2014 @11:23AM (#7541230)

Thanks, it looks great.

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