Seven classes in Haskell

In December 2018 Yuras Shumovich gave me a delightful and gentle introduction to Haskell, that keeps me interested in the language ever since.

Functional programming

While I did not progress beyond classroom projects in Haskell, the functional programming ideas (purity and typefulness) affected the way I write code in Python:

• I often miss the . operator for chaining functions
• with currying dependency injection is not that big of a trick
• I treat Enum more favourably as a proxy for algebraic data type
• dataclasses, where I can (wait, maybe a tuple would be good enough)
• mypy for type checking, even as annotations
• separation of IO and pure functions
• make a pipeline starting from raw immutable data, don’t mutate the data

It is social

The social part of Haskell is also intriguing. Some people would treat their knowledge of Haskell as a sign of technical, intellectual and even moral superiority, but many would be willing to share their knowledge and support you.

In my case, I was lucky to have Yuras as a teacher and mentor. But what if you have not yet found any Haskell peers:

• Online Zurihac is great venue to dive into Haskell and ask around.
• There are two Telegram channels for Haskell in Russian, accepting questions in English too: Haskell Start for beginners and Haskell for advanced discussions. I’m often surprised how smart and well-informed people are there.
• I maintain a larger collection of learning resources for Haskell here, maybe something catches your eye.

Yes, you can use Haskell

Zarak, my collegue in remote work who also joined Yuras course, went on much further in using Haskell for real projects. He is experimenting with IHP, a new framework create CRUD apps, written in Haskell.