[aklug] Learning Haskell... the continuing adventures

From: Christopher Howard <christopher.howard@frigidcode.com>
Date: Thu Jul 14 2011 - 21:31:30 AKDT

List has been a little quiet lately, so I thought I'd blog a little...

I've been reading through an old book (1992) by Davie called "An
Introduction to Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell" which is
the best one I've read so far. Instead of just dumping on syntax like
most of the tutorials I've read, it is real thorough and explains the
concepts. I've been fascinated lately to learn the difference between
"ad-hoc polymorphism" (overloading, which we are all used to) and
"parametric polymorphism" (truly universal polymorphism, which is less
commonly understood), plus a few other nifty concepts like existential
quantification.

There was also some neat history and discussion about the Von Neumann
bottleneck and how the Von Neumann architecture came to dominate
computing. He made an interesting reference to the possibility of an
alternative Data Flow architecture, where (from what I understand) the
CPU processes data based on the dependency relationships among the data.
The book was printed in 1992, but now the idea has been implemented in a
few different hardware arenas, though unfortunately not yet as a
commercially-successful general architecture.

Also, a year or so ago somebody mentioned to me a Web app called
tryruby, which gives you an interactive Ruby shell without having to
install anything. Somebody copied the idea for Haskell:

http://tryhaskell.org/

(Couldn't remember if I had already mentioned that link...)

-- 
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theologia.indicium.us
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Received on Thu Jul 14 21:31:06 2011

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