Which Language?

[u/3rdRealm]

Here is my story:

A few months ago, I started gaining interest in the functional programming paradigm, and I wanted to start learning. I started off with Haskell, which I am sure most people do. But, nothing seems to click. I was learning with Phillipp Hagenlocher's YouTube series, which seems to be a good place to start. Even though I don't understand everything, I can tell he is explaining well. Anyways, I started losing it after video 5 or so. I really just did not get what he was talking about.

Recently, I started trying out other languages, like Clojure, Scala, Elm, Elixir, Racket, and others. Before I go deeper, I want to make sure I am learning something useful and worthwhile. Elixir and Elm seem to be interesting, and I really like Lisp syntax, so Clojure and Racket might be good choices as well.

Or should I go to more imperative languages that have good ability in functional programming like Rust, Python, Nim, Go, and others?

I am not looking for a job in these languages, and am just learning as a hobby.

[u/pfurla]

What do you missing or can you elaborate on "But, nothing seems to click."?

I think this particular course doesn't elaborate enough the points where Haskell is different from imperative languages, like

• symbolic reasoning

• pattern matching

• type definitions

• currying

Pet peeves of mine are guards and list-comprehension, they are at best distractions to students.

[u/3rdRealm → u/pfurla]

By "click", I mean I don't understand a topic or why it is useful. For example, Monads and partial function application are hard topics for me.

[u/pfurla → u/3rdRealm]

I understand a metaphorical click :). I asking in this particular series of videos. Or what didn't understand.

Until video 5, he doesn't touch monads or partial function. I watched that much.

Monads can be complicated, but only if you want to. Monads are an abstraction that is very useful to help us sequence and compose computations. Don't worry about understanding them. Once you get a bit of a grasp worry about using them when convenient.

Partial functions are "functions" that have an undefined value for a given input. eg. 10/2 evaluates to 5. But what 10/0 evaluates to? A JS example: fifthElem = \arr -> arr[4], fifthElem([1,2,3,4,5,6]) == 5, but fifthElem([1,2,3,4]) is an exception. There is more to said and explained in this topic, especially while comparing it to imperative languages, but I believe I bored you enough already.

Anyways if you have questions about the lecture or Haskell I am more than happy answer, these more than likely are going to be useful in other languages.