Re: [coders] Introduction

[Philip Derrin <philip@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 24 May 2006 18:49:43 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> I tried to learn Haskell recently, but found that it was a bit of a 
> catch 22 situation. It seems that in order to learn Haskell you have
> to understand monads and in order to understand monads you have to
> understand Haskell.

That's not really true. The introductory computing subject at UNSW was
based on Haskell for years, without covering monads in any greater
depth than "here's the special syntax you use for programs that do
I/O." Monads are not really easy to understand, but you can avoid
using them until you're familiar with the rest of the language.

Anyway, as long as we're all introducing ourselves: I taught myself
Basic while I was in primary school, and have since learned C, C++,
Perl, Haskell, Python, Objective C, several different assemblers, and
Java, and have occasionally played with Ruby, Lisp and Ada95. I'd quite
like to learn OCaml and Scheme, but have never got around to it.

My current project at work is mostly written in Haskell and C:
http://ertos.nicta.com.au/research/sel4/

Philip