Reading group: Learn You a Haskell: Part One

Haskell
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This Friday (February 14), we’ll be doing our first discussion group on Learn You a Haskell For Great Good! You can read this online or you can read the ebook; employees of thoughtbot already have access through our digital library.

Friday’s discussion will be on the first three chapters: Introduction, Starting Out, and Types and Typeclasses. This book is a fun and easy read. It’s pretty easy to fly through the first few chapters.

Summary and continuing discussion will be posted here on Friday.

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Sound good. I’m curios about it. What kind of jobs/projects people usually choose Haskell over other languages?

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@samnang that’s something we’re all still learning about and discovering. It might be worth starting a dedicated thread for “When would you use Haskell?”

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We did our first discussion in Boston today. We actually discussed the first four chapters from the online edition, because chapter three and four were folded into one chapter in the ebook edition, and that’s what everybody was reading.

So far we’ve covered:

  • Introduction
  • Starting Out
  • Types and Typeclasses
  • Syntax in Functions

Some cool stuff we learned:

  • Pattern matching is really useful
  • case statements are useful but we usually refactor them into functions
  • Haskell uses the offside rule which means that indentation needs to be the same for a block, but doesn’t matter other than that
  • You need to explicitly declare new types as instances of typeclasses in addition to defining the required functions
  • List comprehensions look cool but it’s hard to remember the syntax
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