For the past couple of months I have been learning Haskell. I don’t have an immediate need to know the language, but I like looking at solutions through the lens of functional programming.
I caught the functional bug last year when I wrote a distributed computing framework in Erlang for a large investment bank. The distributed computing features of Erlang were certainly nice, but I also appreciated the code’s predictable execution. If the code compiled, it almost always worked as expected.
Sparked by that experience, I started looking around for another functional language to learn. Rumblings in the blogosphere about Haskell’s strict, succinct expressions caught my attention, so I started learning the language and hacking up some code.
Thanks to excellent documentation coupled with expert answers on the #haskell IRC channel, I feel like I’ve ramped up fairly quickly. I intend to give a little back to the Haskell community by writing posts that attempt to clarify concepts that I found confusing. I’m currently preparing a post that offers yet another introduction to monads. I also want to post some code that I’ve written to allow the expression and manipulation of recurring dates.
