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[alfedenzo]

Last week I wrote my first real Haskell code. For that my matter, it was my first non-trivial purely functional code. Pattern matching is nice. Typing was less annoying than I was expecting, and I suspect there are parts of Haskell that make it even less annoying. I ended up with a simple (unbalanced) binary tree implementation storing key/value

Comments

[svobodo]

Haskell is an interesting language, and one I'd like to get to know better - which is on my long list of things to do when I have the time and energy. It is a bit of a challenge to learn it though since it is so different from imperative and object oriented languages - we where told that people who have never programmed before often find it easier to learn it than people who are used to, for instance, C or Java.

[alfedenzo]

The local university has two introductory computer courses for Math/CS majors. One is the standard Java/OOP, while the other (which was introduced after I started, but which math_foo got into the first teaching of) is done in Scheme.

They used to teach some Scheme at the end of a 2nd year CS course, but they've stopped now, so for most people, the only chance they'll get to see a functional language is if they take the 4th year Programming Languages course (where the first assignment is to write a lambda calculus evaluator in Scheme).