andthennothing.net

This Friday I attended the Haskell for Mere Mortals + C#3 Innovations tutorial as part of the Expo-C conference. It was my first encounter with functional languages so I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out that Erik Meijer is really passionated about (functional) programming languages, which made him really entertaining and educational to listen to.

Haskell is a beautiful language. It’s extremely minimalistic so I think it doesn’t take that much time to learn the language, however to understand programs written in Haskell and write your own programs are mind twisting activities. I very much like the declarative aspects of the language—that you describe what needs to be done, not how to do it. Another thing that seems to be pretty unique to Haskell is that everything is lazy evaluated, i.e. all operations are delayed until they are really necessary.

The “C#3 Innovations” part of the tutorial was interesting as well. LINQ is an interesting project that adds declarative manipulation of arbitrary collections to the .NET languages. By doing so many of the functional programming concepts are introduced.

I think I will try to learn a functional language. Most of the languages I’ve used to date are quite similar: Pascal, C++, Java, Python, Ruby. Functional languages require entirely different neural connections. I’ve heard good things about OCaml so I think I’ll try it out, but I’m not sure just yet. I’m looking for a language where I can learn functional programming and which can be of some practical use.