[ayakang31415]

Haskell sounds like a good language to hone your programming skills. What kind of projects is Haskell suited for to get started (besides Euler project)? I use Python primarily for scientific research (mostly numerical computation).

[setopt]

I didn’t play with this myself, but I’ve heard good things about writing parsers in Haskell (e.g. the Parsec library and friends). Hell, even Pandoc is written in Haskell and that’s arguably the king of document parsers. So that could be one area. I also heard cool things about QuickCheck, which I think is the inspiration for Hypothesis in the Python ecosystem, if you want to explore more how to do testing. Perhaps the “Real World Haskell” book might be a good fit to see other possible projects.

Except the obvious functional programming concepts, one thing I enjoyed exploring in Haskell was “infinite data structures” and “lazy evaluation” – like how you could provide a recursion relation to define an infinite list of numbers, but only the finite elements in the list you ask to print are actually calculated behind the scenes. This “lazy evaluation” can be used to build algorithms that would be completely unreasonable in any other language.

I also liked how easy it is to define new data structures. Like implementing a minimal tree data structure can be done in literally one line of code, which is just ridiculous compared to most languages that I’ve tried.