alastairparagas / haskell_exercises

Haskell Assignments from UPenn's CS194 Introduction to Haskell Course, with some Machine Learning from Stanford's CS229 too!

Haskell Fun

"Do or do not, there is no try" ~ Master Yoda

I decided to pick up Haskell for the fun of learning a truly strict functional programming language besides F#, which we used at Florida International University's Survey of Programming Languages class.

Here is a sampler of how Haskell code looks like!

main :: IO()
main = do
  putStrLn "Hello World!"

If we wanted to be more verbose:

module Main where 

import Prelude (putStrLn)

main :: IO()
main = do
  Prelude.putStrLn "Hello World!"

Resources

In this repository, I try to follow multiple resources, but mostly following the format of these classes:

• UPenn's CIS194 Introduction to Haskell

  This class assumes no prior knowledge with functional programming nor with programming in general (at least, that's how I feel).

• Stanford's CS240H Functional Systems in Haskell

  This class goes into a deeper dive of using Haskell for building functional systems, although Week 1 practically goes through a very quick overview of what is covered on the above course. Mainly helpful for getting a taste of how to do low-level stuff in Haskell.

• Stanford's CS229 Machine Learning

  This class goes into depth about everything Machine Learning, but does not include anything up to and past the level and complexity of Neural Networks. I mainly consulted this class because I get bored with doing pure homework assignments from the UPenn class from time to time, so I take this class, do the problem sets and take notes and implement the Machine Learning algorithms in Haskell!

I also consult these resources quite frequently:

• Haskell The Hard Way

  A nice blog post that gets through a lot of the important stuff in Haskell very quickly. Mostly consulted this for the IO and Monads Sections.

• Hoogle

  Practically a search engine for all of the available Haskell modules, functions and so forth. It's a cool resource because you can search using type signatures, which means you can search functions not only by names, but something like:

  [Int] -> Int -> Int

  which searches for all functions that accept a list of Integers and an Integer for inputs, and outputs an Integer

Why learn Haskell?

• Unlike F# and Scala, it doesn't make any compromise by allowing you to use OOP where convenient. This means that from here on out, it's full steam ahead for Functional Programming - no exceptions! A brand new way of thinking and looking at how to solve problems!

• Wanted another functional programming paradigm perspective away from F#. I also considered picking up Haskell since a while back because of the once-corporate license that was present to using F#. However, since that time (about 2-3 years ago), Microsoft has proudly open-sourced .NET Core, which includes the F# family! Check out details here and here

• Because it's hipster tech. It's nice to get first dibs on a programming language with a smaller community

• Offers an interesting take on managing state (or the lack thereof). Since there is no facility in the language that allows for mutable variables, at any point in time, you are working with immutable - unchangeable values. Haskell throws a fit when you try to change one! Working in a purely functional way offers interesting ways to make code structured, testable (test-driven development) and easily parallelizable from the get go.