Haskell is such a great language. I've been recommending this book for a while now. If you are in doubt whether you should start learning it, read this post by Jeff Bone:
After I read it, I immediately began learning Haskell. Since then, Haskell made my brain melt multiple times. But it has also enabled me to build an expression parser and analytic differentiator that I use every day (among other things, but that's what I'm most proud of). Such a program would be a lot harder to create, if it weren't for Haskell's ridiculously powerful type system and pattern matching.
Also, after learning the Haskell way of things, I recognized the reasons for many issues I had with code written in another programming language. Don't just go out there and do object-oriented programming because everybody else seems to do it, often it is imperative (pun intended) to use the declarative (functional) programming paradigm to keep you out of debugging hell.
The true ending to that story is when you come back to your old gal and start convincing her to get monad imports. "You'll feel just like your old self, only more functional! " You tell her. The next day you hear even your neighbor Facebook got his girl PHP to try out lambdas and type annotations.
Then you realize that Haskell has been sleeping around. A lot.
Certainly doesn't help with the perception of the tech industry as a boys club. I mean I know it may have been written in jest but I was personally cringing while reading it and figured it'd be at the very least a little alienating (at worst outright offensive) for any women who'd happen to read it. Maybe I'm being oversensitive, I just know I wouldn't write anything like that.
Are you serious? From your description, I was expecting some kind of gross pornography. I think that these 'rolling in the aisles' displays of public piety in the service of political correctness are getting a little out of hand these days.
I think you are exaggerating somewhat, I was just saying I didn't like it and even caveated that this could be just me being oversensitive.
However if you can't see why someone may feel a bit weird reading "You'd be there, banging away at your regular girl" then I'm not sure what I can say. It's not rolling-in-the-aisles piety, it's just that our community already has a bad image and stuff like this isn't helping.
It certainly wasn't my intention to alienate or offend anyone by posting this link. I do not share his intimate feelings on programming languages but I found it amusing that someone would compare a programming language to an on/off-relationship.
Heh it's not your fault, my ire/confusion was directed at the article not at you. This is all subjective anyway and as a sister comment indicates I may have been unique in my feelings towards it
Although, I think, if someone reads it who's not familiar with programming languages, the reactions, when you tell them what Haskell and Python are, might range from hilarious to WTF.
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0441...
After I read it, I immediately began learning Haskell. Since then, Haskell made my brain melt multiple times. But it has also enabled me to build an expression parser and analytic differentiator that I use every day (among other things, but that's what I'm most proud of). Such a program would be a lot harder to create, if it weren't for Haskell's ridiculously powerful type system and pattern matching.
Also, after learning the Haskell way of things, I recognized the reasons for many issues I had with code written in another programming language. Don't just go out there and do object-oriented programming because everybody else seems to do it, often it is imperative (pun intended) to use the declarative (functional) programming paradigm to keep you out of debugging hell.
edit: clarification