The Haskell School of Expression

What Hacker News says

1. bwanabJun 2022
   If you’re more inclined to visual and/or musical arts, I’d recommend “Th Haskell School Of Expression” by Paul Hudak. He guides you through the language and the techniques with an eye for concise, expressive code that has good runtime characteristics.
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2. anyfooJan 2021
   Somehow it never comes up in recommendations (I don't know why), but the book that gave me a lot of pleasure in learning Haskell in the beginning was "The Haskell School of Expression" by Paul Hudak.

   It just "naturally" plays around with the language using very simple concepts, and at the same time showing the simplicity and expressiveness of working with those concepts that would be hard in other languages.

   It's a bit of an old book by now, so it covers an older subset of the language (and maybe some very few syntactic details might be different, but I don't think it should impede anything), but for starting out you don't want to go too "wide" anyway.

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3. throwaway487548Nov 2018
   A decent CS degree, like that of MIT matters a lot.

   I could give an example. Once upon a time a stumbled upon this classic article (which I re-read sometimes to feel better):

   https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

   When I read this for the first time I have been literally shocked by sudden realization that I have coded some stuff in PHP but never knew it is such a crap.

   It also taught me that I literally know nothing, that I am merely a stupid coder, not a programmer, so I undertook a serious study of CS fundamentals to be able to write an article like this in the future.

   Now, after a few years of studying, I know a half-a-dozen of languages and I know crap when I see it. Ironically, what is going on with the Node ecosystem puts PHP3 into a shame. But it is natural, because most of JS coders have no CS background. People with CS background sometimes produce gems like Go or Erlang, while "mere coders" always produce things like PHP, J2EE and npm.

   There is only one thing that I regret - it could save me so much time by not reading bullshit on the web if only I could find the right books (like Programming Erlang, Haskell School of Expression or On Lisp) and right courses (like Dan Grossman's and 6.001 2004 - the last course in Scheme) first. There is a huge, qualitative difference between a well-written gems like these and fucking crap some narcissistic idiots post in their blogs.

   I have found the right books and the right courses by literally swimming thorough the sewers for years. A decent school will teach you the right principles, instead of irrelevant details, in ML or Scheme right from the beginning.

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4. anyfooJul 2018
   Oh no...

   Paul Hudak's book "The Haskell School of Expression" is probably the most beautiful programming-related book I ever read. It not only got me into Haskell (significantly altering my programming path in life), it was also such a joy to read.

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5. harperleeDec 2016
   For me, during the university ANSI Common Lisp was the Kernighan & Ritchie of Lisp - a standalone physical source of everything that I needed to start doing interesting things. Since then I haven't found another "canonical book" for another language that I jumped on, instead relying basically on internet. On that line, I loved "The haskell school of expression", though!
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6. jberrymanMay 2015
   FWIW Hudak's Haskell School of Expression was the first programming book I ever read, and probably the reason I do programming today.
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