Difference between revisions of "Learning Haskell"

Revision as of 19:52, 9 July 2011

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 (PDF) 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.

You can ask questions to members of the haskell community on maillists, IRC, or StackOverflow.

Implementations

Here is an overview about Haskell implementations (for new, or non-expert users, we recommend starting with the Haskell Platform).

	Messages	Size	Tools	Remarks
GHC	+	-	++	Many language extensions; generated code is very fast. The most popular implementation.
Hugs	+/-	++	-	Fast compilation; used a lot for learning Haskell and rapid code development. See also WinHugs.
nhc98	+	+	++	Profiling, debugging, tracing. Not actively developed.
Yhc	+	+	?	Compiles to bytecodes. Runtime easily portable. Not actively developed.
Helium	++	++	-	No type classes (yet!) and thus incompatible with most material on this site. Made for teaching/learning. Excellent error messages.
UHC	+/-	-	+/-	Developed for experimentation with language features. As a Haskell compiler still under development.

Detailed information on the implementations can be found in a separate article.

Material

Below there are links to certain introductory material. If you want to dig deeper, see Books and tutorials.

Textbooks

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".
YAHT - Yet Another Haskell Tutorial (good 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
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! Beautiful, illustrated Haskell tutorial for programmers with less of a functional programming background.

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

Type classes

Generic programming

[Dead link; IA backup] Scrap your boilerplate

Popular libraries

Reference

The official language definition: Language and library specification
Haskell Newbie
Tour of the Haskell Prelude
Haskell Reference
Haskell Reference card
A tour of the Haskell Monad functions
Tour of the Helium Prelude
Some common Hugs error messages
The Haskell Cheatsheet - A reference card and mini-tutorial in one.

Course material

Introduction to Functional Programming, Chalmers
Programming in Haskell, Chalmers
Advanced Functional Programming, Chalmers
[Dead link] Advanced Advanced Functional Programming, Chalmers
CS 11 Caltech
Functional programming: course notes (English, Dutch, Spanish), slides in Dutch
CS1011: Tutorials, lab exercises and solutions
[Hungarian] Functional Programming: online Haskell exercises (maybe Explorer can't show xml content)

@@ Line 130: / Line 130: @@
 * [http://www.cs.uu.nl/helium/docs/TourOfPrelude.html Tour of the Helium Prelude]
 * [http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/craft2e/errors/allErrors.html Some common Hugs error messages]
-* [http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/] - A reference card and mini-tutorial in one.
+* [http://cheatsheet.codeslower.com/ The Haskell Cheatsheet] - A reference card and mini-tutorial in one.
 === Course material ===