I’ve slept 6 hours in the last 72, and I somehow stumbled onto DeveloperWorks’ Haskell overview (I won’t link to it as it needs registration and their site is a trainwreck) .
The core features are baffling to an imperative guy like me:
- all variables are immutable
- order of instructions don’t matter
- no function side-effects
- no loops (or blocks by the look of it)
It keeps cropping up in odd places: PUGS , DARCS, pragprogs language of the year (for 2002, admittedly).
I finally read Mob Software which laments (among other things) that all computers are build to be spoken to in the spawn of FORTRAN. A new perspective might be good – if only for its Sapir-Whorf effects.
Also it’s less bracy than Lisp/Scheme (easier on the RSI), and seems to be considered a ‘pure’ functional language. It might as well be full-on weird, no sense doing things by half.
This tutorial looks promising, I’ll stick HUGS on and give it a whirl. I daresay I’ll get bored/scared within a week, but you never know…
Right, nighty night.