Lately I’ve become interested in functional programming, and Haskell always felt like the thing I should learn, so this week I finally started reading Learn You a Haskell. So far I’ve been through the first six chapters and they do a great job at indroducing many concepts.
Pattern matching got me hooked. I had read the Patterns chapter in the swift book, and a couple blog posts on the subject, but they always felt like little more than “switch with ranges”. After reading the pattern matching chapter in Learn You a Haskell, suddenly Patterns appeared much more useful, even in Swift.
And then I read some of the concepts around higher order functions, how all functions are curried, how trivial partial application is, and how concise and clear everything reads once you get past the syntax choices. My mind was blown time after time.
