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My best advice is do not try to learn functional programming via Haskell. It has done more to turn people off of functional programming that just about anything

My best advice is do not try to learn functional programming via Haskell. It has done more to turn people off of functional programming that just about anything. If you want to learn statically typed functional programming learn Elm (which takes only a few days), then one of F# or OCaml. If you want to learn dynamically typed Functional Programming, learn Clojure or Racket/Scheme. They amount of investment it takes to see return on learning Haskell makes it terrible for an introductory language. And every proponent of it glosses over this part. It has some advanced concepts but its not an introductory language. There is so much benefit you can get to your coding from learning FP that you should pick a language that allows you to see and judge that value prop on your own quickly, not have to invest so much time to be haskell proficient to try to get the return on your learning.

claudiawerner 7y ago
I found Elm's type system to be extremely cumbersome in comparison to Haskell's.
- sullyj3 7y ago
  That's because you already knew haskell and knew what you were missing out on. Elm having a less expressive type system makes it a much better introduction to concepts like ADTs and pattern matching, higher order functions, and enforced immutability, because there's less to trip you up.
jcora 7y ago
Or go all in and actually expose yourself to an entirely different programming paradigm, there is so much more to "FP" that you can only find in Haskell and beyond.
taneq 7y ago
> It has done more to turn people off of functional programming that just about anything. The only thing worse in my book is FP evangelists. FP has some cool ideas and is an interestingly different way to do things compared with imperative programming, but enough exposure to the “FP is obviously the best paradigm and anybody who isn’t a fanatic is clearly just unenlightened” crowd will sour anybody on it.

claudiawerner 7y ago

I found Elm's type system to be extremely cumbersome in comparison to Haskell's.

sullyj3 7y ago
That's because you already knew haskell and knew what you were missing out on. Elm having a less expressive type system makes it a much better introduction to concepts like ADTs and pattern matching, higher order functions, and enforced immutability, because there's less to trip you up.

jcora 7y ago

Or go all in and actually expose yourself to an entirely different programming paradigm, there is so much more to "FP" that you can only find in Haskell and beyond.

taneq 7y ago

> It has done more to turn people off of functional programming that just about anything. The only thing worse in my book is FP evangelists. FP has some cool ideas and is an interestingly different way to do things compared with imperative programming, but enough exposure to the “FP is obviously the best paradigm and anybody who isn’t a fanatic is clearly just unenlightened” crowd will sour anybody on it.