[siraben]

Writing interpreters in Haskell (which is what some of the lessons seem to be about) is a great way to learn the language. It naturally motivates recursion, algebraic data types, strong types, higher-order functions and later, when effects such as state and errors are needed, monads arise naturally.

The best part? It takes a ridiculously small amount of code to do all that, maybe around a hundred or less. Languages without ADTs and higher-order functions bend over backwards to recover them[0] via design patterns.

[0] http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/hodgp.pdf

[mason55]

It also introduces you to the expression problem pretty quickly and organically :)

I agree with the comment though. I learned Haskell and how to write an interpreter at the same time by working through the book Crafting Interpreters. It was a great match.

[pjmlp]

Back when I did my degree, Haskell still wasn't a thing, like it was giving its first steps.

So the choice would be Lisp, Prolog, Caml Light, or the recently released Objective Caml.

The year before I took compilers design project, the TA responsible for it used to disallow them from the implementation language option list, as it would make the assignment too easy.

[lubesGordi]

Agreed! I've been trying to learn haskell for a long time, and this guy writes a json parser live, giving his intuition along the way. It's helped me immensely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9RUqGYuGfw

[dustingetz]

compiler, evaluator constructs should be the bottom of the next set of mainstream languages (possibly being born today by former haskell programmers?) imagine free monad lisp