peterv wrote:
It looks like its gonna take a long time for me to learn Haskell. I'm not
sure if my long history of imperative and object-oriented programming has
something to do with it. Reading Haskell books like SOE is one thing, but
writing software in Haskell is really difficult for me.
It takes practice. ;-)
Not only do I miss
the "spoiled OO programmer" IDEs with all their candy and code completion
and assistants
Ah, but in Haskell, you don't need to *write* as much code in the first
place! :-D
but I also get the feeling that although similar programs in
Haskell or typically N times shorter than their imp/OO counterparts, it
would take *me* at least N^2 longer to write them ;)
Is this true for Haskell in general?
Yeah, Haskell is definitely *not* a language for "hacking away as fast
as your fingers can type without thinking too much". It's more like a
game of chess - you spend a lot of time trying to bend your mind around
the best way to achieve a thing. But then, when you actually start
typing, you often get there faster.
Or realise that the type system is going to stop you... :-/
Regarding those monads, I read a lot of stuff about these beast, trying to
get a high-level understanding about them (and apparently I'm not the only
newby who struggled with that ;), but after having read "You Could Have
Invented Monads!" and then reading
http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/marktoberdorf, it all became
much clearer. Those pictures really helped...
Monads take a while to "get used to", but they're not so scary after that...
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