Benefits of learning Haskell for a relatively new programmer.

[VisionIncision]

Hi all,

I only registered today so be patient with me, I have not quite gotten a feel for the dynamic of the forum yet.

 

Basically, I am a first year CS student currently using Java. I have been looking at Haskell and Functional Programming. What benefits would be reaped from learning Haskell and another paradigm (currently only use OOP) early on?

 

Regards,

Jack

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Haskell will teach you to think in a completely different way from Java -- it is very, very different. It's good to understand functional programming for many reasons. It encourages programs written in small, reusable and easily-tested chunks, provides useful ways of operating on large datasets (lazy evaluation, folding/mapping), makes parallelism easier, and (in Haskell's case, at least -- there are dynamically typed functional languages) provides type restraints that make it very difficult to do anything dangerous.

 

Here's a good paper, called Why Functional Programming Matters:

 

http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html

[VisionIncision]

Haskell will teach you to think in a completely different way from Java -- it is very, very different. It's good to understand functional programming for many reasons. It encourages programs written in small, reusable and easily-tested chunks, provides useful ways of operating on large datasets (lazy evaluation, folding/mapping), makes parallelism easier, and (in Haskell's case, at least -- there are dynamically typed functional languages) provides type restraints that make it very difficult to do anything dangerous.

 

Here's a good paper, called Why Functional Programming Matters:

 

http://www.cse.chalm...pers/whyfp.html

 

Thanks for that. I shall have a read tomorrow when I am not almost sleeping.