19 Apr 2007
First Haskell Tutorial Finished
I just finished off the Haskell tutorial I was running through and I feel slightly enlightened and also disappointed. My expectations were fairly simple. By the end of a 150 page introduction to a language I should feel like I can do something interesting with it. Interesting being defined by me in any way I like. I didn’t get that feeling with Two Dozen Short Lessons.
The entire body was overly technical and I spent more time beating my head against understanding the content of the examples than I did trying to grok the actual Haskell lessons. I found it very neat to be walked through building a DES cryptography system, but I don’t feel it made me understand Haskell better.
On the upside, I can now look at Haskell code and generally work out what’s going on. The syntax mostly makes sense to me, though the typing of functions still messes with my head from time to time. Some of the random code flying past on #haskell is becoming less alien. I’ve written a few small proof of concept tools and am gaining more confidence and comfort with the language.
However I don’t feel ready to set out on my own and write something real world that solves a problem yet. I don’t think I have enough of a grounding in Haskell and its workings. So I’m off to find another online tutorial to work through!