Learning Haskell
This portal points to places where you can go if you want to learn Haskell.
The Introduction to Haskell on the Haskell website tells you what Haskell gives you: substantially increased programmer productivity, shorter, clearer, and more maintainable code, fewer errors, higher reliability, a smaller semantic gap between the programmer and the language, shorter lead times. There is an old but still relevant paper about Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes. More recently, Sebastian Sylvan wrote an article about Why Haskell Matters.
There is also a table comparing Haskell to other functional languages. Many questions about functional programming are answered by the comp.lang.functional FAQ.
Implementations
Here is an overview about Haskell implementations:
| Messages | Size | Tools | Remarks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hugs | +/- | ++ | - | Fast compilation; used a lot for learning Haskell and rapid code development. See also WinHugs. |
| GHC | + | - | ++ | Many language extensions; generated code is very fast. The most popular implementation. |
| NHC | ? | + | ++ | Profiling, debugging, tracing |
| Yhc | ? | + | ? | Compiles to bytecodes. Runtime easily portable. Still under heavy development. |
| Helium | ++ | ++ | - | No type classes (yet!) and thus incompatible with most material on this site. Made for teaching/learning. |
Material
Below there are links to certain introductory material. If you want to dig deeper, see Books and tutorials.
Textbooks
- The Haskell School of Expression
- Haskell: the Craft of Functional Programming
- Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell
- An Introduction to Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell
- Algorithms: A functional programming approach
- The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths, and Programming
- Programming in Haskell
Online tutorials
- Meta-tutorial
- Haskell Wikibook A long tutorial on Haskell that includes "Yet Another Haskell Tutorial", "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" and "All about monads".
- Yet Another Haskell Tutorial (best tutorial available online, also here)
- Two dozen short lessons
- A Gentle Introduction to Haskell - classic text, but not so gentle really :D
- Haskell-Tutorial
- Online Haskell Course (German)
- Haskell for C Programmers
Advanced tutorials
- Hitchhikers Guide to Haskell
- Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours
- Tackling the Awkward Squad (on I/O, interfacing to C, concurrency and exceptions)
Debugging/profiling/optimization
Monads
- You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)
- Monads for Functional Programming
- All about monads
- IO inside: down the Rabbit Hole
Type classes
- The paper that at first time introduced type classes and their implementation using dictionaries
- More papers on the type classes
Generic programming
Popular libraries
- ByteStrings?
- Parsec, a fast combinator parser
- Modern array libraries
- Gtk2Hs?
Reference
- Haskell Newbie
- Tour of the Haskell Syntax
- A Tour of the Haskell Prelude (i.e. predefined functions)
- Haskell Reference
- Haskell Reference Card
- A tour of the Haskell Monad functions
- Tour of the Helium Prelude
- Some common Hugs error messages
- Some Haskell Idioms
- Questions and Answers (old Haskell wiki)
Course material
- Programming in Haskell, Chalmers
- CS 11 Caltech
- Functional programming: course notes (English, Dutch, Spanish), slides in Dutch
- CS1011: Tutorials, lab exercises and solutions