gday gday.

uni starts next week, and apparently we'll be taught haskell. the change to a functional language looks like a big step. i'm not having any particular trouble getting a headstart with tutorials or anything, but i'd like to hear what more experienced users have to say about haskell.

what's it good for?

does it have a place in the games industry?

anything else interesting regarding haskell...

most people seem to seek experience in imperative languages, so i'd also like to know why one might think to teach haskell first in a programming course?

julz

Hi Julz,

I'm currently taking a functional programming class in uni (5 weeks now), and haskell is the main language we use. It is indeed a big step from imperative programming, but I must say I absolutely love haskell. Our first assignment was to write a functional query language (think SQL). I wrote a table print function, select, project, join function (and some helper functions) in about 100 lines of code. Amazing isn't it? If you write a function and it gets past the compiler, 99% of the time it will just work the first time.

The expressiveness is great, but it means there is much more information on a single line of code. So if you read code at the speed you read C-Script, you won't understand it. That's one thing you have to get used to, but more important is the lack of state. There are no assignments, no side effects in normal haskell functions. This takes some getting used to. You can't have a loop counter.

Adoption of functional programming in the software industry has been slow, but I think this is mainly due to a lack of functional programmers. FP certainly has some real world advantages >for some applications<. For example, because of the lack of state, you simply can't make some bugs. You can't possibly follow a null pointer or something like that. Another important advantage that will become more important in the future is concurent programming. Haskell has some very simple, non-intrusive "hints" that allow the compiler to automatically paralellise your application. This is much harder in impertative langauges, because it is much harder to mathematically prove things about a program written in an imperative language, than a program written in a functional language.

So far, FP has mostly been used for academic applications. But you can use OpenGL, and I think there have been entire FPSs made with haskell.

To conclude, don't expect your programming knowledge of imperative languages to help you, and functional programming can be a lot of fun. Try to program in an imperative way and your in for a painfull ride..

Oh by the way, I think starting out with a functional language doesn't make much sense for a CS education. Are you studying mathematics or something like that?

I would not be concerned about getting a headstart- it will all be explained in class. My university uses its own functional language Opal:
http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~opal/ocs/doc/html/index.html

The reasons were twofold:
a) give students a strong foundation in logical thinking
b) level the playing field so that long-time C/Java programmers don't have an advantage over other students

Sorry for being cynical, but I don't think functional languages have a reason for existence outside of academia & research. Particularly in computer games you want performance and control. Neither of which is provided by functional languages. The one thing I did like about Opal was its support for lambda functions- but that I can get with Boost on C++ as well.

Enjoy the course and the language, but don't expect to use much of it beyond the current semester.

Ditto to almost everything posted above.

Don't expect to use Haskell outside of school, but learning new programming languages, IMHO, is key to becoming a computer scientist and not just another code monkey.

When you're trying to program for 4th dimensional computer hardware in 2020, being able to think in multiple ways will come in handy.

I wouldn't say experience with imperative languages is useless for learning fp. Knowing the basic types (int, char, bool,...), the concepts of operators and precedence (ok maybe that's just math), understanding the difference between a function call and a function definition (something that absolute beginners often have problems with), and many other things that are so natural to you now, are still usefull in haskell.

I don't know (yet), if learning haskell will be usefull for programming in imperative languages for me. As others have sayd above, I think that learning to think in new ways is always usefull in the long run. And maybe it will prove usefull to apply some patterns found in fp in an imperative language. Like recursion, folds, etc. I'll see.

okay that makes sense. so much of that i take for granted, but at orientation week i met a couple of people who had been doing computer science for a couple of years and asked me "are you one of those guys that start the course already knowing all these languages?" and thought it hilarious when i said i only know a couple, because most people go in not knowing anything.

julz

that's interesting. a few of my mates are interested in programming (a small few), and they have dabbled in it but are by no means proficient at any language.

julz