Hi all,

I only registered today so be patient with me, I have not quite gotten a feel for the dynamic of the forum yet.

 

Basically, I am a first year CS student currently using Java. I have been looking at Haskell and Functional Programming. What benefits would be reaped from learning Haskell and another paradigm (currently only use OOP) early on?

 

Regards,

Jack

Haskell will teach you to think in a completely different way from Java -- it is very, very different. It's good to understand functional programming for many reasons. It encourages programs written in small, reusable and easily-tested chunks, provides useful ways of operating on large datasets (lazy evaluation, folding/mapping), makes parallelism easier, and (in Haskell's case, at least -- there are dynamically typed functional languages) provides type restraints that make it very difficult to do anything dangerous.

 

Here's a good paper, called Why Functional Programming Matters:

 

http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.html

Haskell will teach you to think in a completely different way from Java -- it is very, very different. It's good to understand functional programming for many reasons. It encourages programs written in small, reusable and easily-tested chunks, provides useful ways of operating on large datasets (lazy evaluation, folding/mapping), makes parallelism easier, and (in Haskell's case, at least -- there are dynamically typed functional languages) provides type restraints that make it very difficult to do anything dangerous.

 

Here's a good paper, called Why Functional Programming Matters:

 

http://www.cse.chalm...pers/whyfp.html

 

Thanks for that. I shall have a read tomorrow when I am not almost sleeping.