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by MuffinFlavored 3944 days ago
As a novice programmer used to node.js, C, etc., how the hell is one supposed to get started with Haskell? I've tried multiple tutorials, read many articles like this, and still can't follow along.

It makes me wonder who ends up using this language for anything serious in even the slightest time crunch...

5 comments

The big not-so-secret secret is that you don't have to understand much of Monad theory to enjoy Haskell. If you want to use Haskell as a nice functional language with a great typesystem.

As spopejoy says, Monad is a typeclass, that means every Monad is a type on itself. So you you can get by just learning every monad for its use without ever needing to know the theory that binds them.

The Maybe Monad is just an option type, the list monad is just a list and the IO monad is just a sequence of operations that gets returned to the runtime from the main function. Who cares that they all share a typeclass?

I've heard good things about the opening sections of the WikiBook - and if it is hard to understand, ask questions and then improve it! :)

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

Try elm (http://elm-lang.org/) first; it doesn't mention Functor, Applicative, Monoid, Monad anywhere.

You might come back to Haskell later and it won't seem like such a big deal. (I use Haskell for serious work and love that a quick patch doesn't suddenly start breaking things in 10 other places - it's a real time-saver!)

Try these: learnyouahaskell.com haskellbook.com