Haskell forces you to program in the pure functional programming paradigm. This, and other related idiosyncrasies of the language (such as default lazy evaluation), require you to use specific design patterns which take time to learn and even when mastered are of questionable convenience. At best, they don’t seem to provide any advantage, and at worst they actively harm expressivity and efficiency. Haskell seems mainly used by enthusiasts for hobby purposes, there seems to be very little free software written in Haskell besides tools for Haskell itself. Some companies claim to use it for commercial software development and/or prototyping, but it appears to be a small market.
If you like the static-typed functional approach, but you don’t want to struggle with the pure functional paradigm, you may want to take a look at the ML family: F# is the biggest, Microsoft-backed, member of the family, it runs on .NET but it has an open source compiler and runs on Mono. OCaml is its non-.NET ancestor which still has some significant user base. If you prefer dynamic typing, then try Scheme (Racket).
Being new to this whole area, I can’t say I have preference for anything, and I cannot imagine how any programming paradigm is related to its capabilities and potential.
Where I stand I rather be given a (paradigmatic, if you will) direction, rather than recommended a specific programming language given a programming paradigm of choice.
But as I understand, what you say is that if one opts for going for Haskell, he’d be better off going for F# instead?
Think of programming paradigms as construction techniques and programming languages as tools. There is no technique or tool that is ideal in all situations. If you want a broad education, you might want to study one representative language for any of the main paradigms, for instance C (imperative, static typed), C++/Java/C# (imperative-object oriented, largely static typed), one of the Lisp family, such as Scheme (multi-paradigm, mostly imperative and functional, metaprogramming, dynamic typed), and one of the ML family, such as F# (functional and imperative, static typed). Python is very popular and very useful, and its basic syntax is easy to learn, but given that it is rather multi-paradigm and very high level (hiding lots of the underlying complexity) perhaps it is not the ideal place to start if you want to really understand what programming is about. At least, learn it aside something else. Similar considerations apply to “Python-like” languages such as Javascript, Ruby, Lua, etc.
But as I understand, what you say is that if one opts for going for Haskell, he’d be better off going for F# instead?
Haskell forces you to program in the pure functional programming paradigm. This, and other related idiosyncrasies of the language (such as default lazy evaluation), require you to use specific design patterns which take time to learn and even when mastered are of questionable convenience. At best, they don’t seem to provide any advantage, and at worst they actively harm expressivity and efficiency.
Haskell seems mainly used by enthusiasts for hobby purposes, there seems to be very little free software written in Haskell besides tools for Haskell itself. Some companies claim to use it for commercial software development and/or prototyping, but it appears to be a small market.
If you like the static-typed functional approach, but you don’t want to struggle with the pure functional paradigm, you may want to take a look at the ML family: F# is the biggest, Microsoft-backed, member of the family, it runs on .NET but it has an open source compiler and runs on Mono. OCaml is its non-.NET ancestor which still has some significant user base.
If you prefer dynamic typing, then try Scheme (Racket).
Being new to this whole area, I can’t say I have preference for anything, and I cannot imagine how any programming paradigm is related to its capabilities and potential. Where I stand I rather be given a (paradigmatic, if you will) direction, rather than recommended a specific programming language given a programming paradigm of choice. But as I understand, what you say is that if one opts for going for Haskell, he’d be better off going for F# instead?
Think of programming paradigms as construction techniques and programming languages as tools. There is no technique or tool that is ideal in all situations.
If you want a broad education, you might want to study one representative language for any of the main paradigms, for instance C (imperative, static typed), C++/Java/C# (imperative-object oriented, largely static typed), one of the Lisp family, such as Scheme (multi-paradigm, mostly imperative and functional, metaprogramming, dynamic typed), and one of the ML family, such as F# (functional and imperative, static typed).
Python is very popular and very useful, and its basic syntax is easy to learn, but given that it is rather multi-paradigm and very high level (hiding lots of the underlying complexity) perhaps it is not the ideal place to start if you want to really understand what programming is about. At least, learn it aside something else. Similar considerations apply to “Python-like” languages such as Javascript, Ruby, Lua, etc.
Generally yes.
Thank you.