[wplug] vaguely linux related

[Tom Moertel]

On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 18:29, Ryan Kaulakis wrote:
> 
>  Does any one have any suggestions for what language I should learn?

Haskell:  http://www.haskell.org/

Deep, powerful, elegant.  It's a lazy, purely functional language.  It's
sufficiently different from mainstream languages to offer new ways of
thinking about problems, yet is useful for a large variety of real-world
problems.  Plus it's loads of fun.

A quick taste, using the Fibonacci series as an example:

    -- definition of the series (try /this/ without laziness!)

    fibs = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)

    -- take the first fifteen elements

    take 15 fibs
    [1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,377,610]

    -- take the 301st element (zero-based indexing)

    fibs !! 300
    359579325206583560961765665172189099052367214309267232255589801

Some more examples:

    Solutions to 1996 ACM Programming Contest finals:
    http://www.moertel.com/~thor/acm-contest-1996/

    My entry in the ICFP 2001 Programming Contest:
    http://www.moertel.com/~thor/icfp2001/

    Robot Visualization and Analysis Toolkit (for 2002 contest)
    http://www.moertel.com/~thor/ravt/

Join #haskell on irc.freenode.net to talk to friendly Haskell folks.

Cheers,
Tom