Posted on Saturday, 28th August 2010 by charpi
Remembering ”The pragmatic programmer: Fro, Journeyman to Master”, each developer should learn a new language each year.
This year, I will give its chance to Haskell.
Why Haskell ?
Scala was a candidate for this year but Haskell has a strong reputation in the functional world. I came to functional with Erlang because of its concurrent and distribution aspects and I have the feeling that I miss some fundamental notions.
A lot of people seems to like (to venerate) types. Personally, I can live without type definition even if I recognize some benefit as documentation support when you distribute a library. A language like Haskell has a very strong type system and it seems to be construct around this system system, so it could be the opportunity to play with types and to discover their benefit.
Haskell has also an advantage over Erlang. It generates native code. With native code, you can deploy an application without thinking “Does my target system get the VM ?”. For utility programs, native code tends to offer better performance.
The first time I heard about Haskell was in 2003 when I was testing some innovative DVCS: GNU Arch and Darcs. Darcs is written in Haskell.
In the following weeks, I hope to have time to write about my first steps with Haskell.
Tags: erlang, haskell
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