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"Real World Haskell" book review. by brandonh

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"Real World Haskell" book review.
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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;Haskell is one of the most difficult languages to learn. &nbsp;&nbsp;It has many conventions simply not found in other languages. &nbsp;&nbsp;Such as a lack of variables, no looping, these weird things called monads which no one really explains well, and other oddities. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Haskell seems to be well loved by the academic and computer science communities for being a "pure" language that enforces "pure" code. &nbsp;However it appears to require far too much of a conceptual leap that it has left people behind. &nbsp;Also little information exist about Haskell and how it performs in the real world, as most of it's claims lean much more of it's theoretical benefits than tangible and measurable benchmarks or testimonies from people who run it at scale.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;About 2 years ago I read a book called "Real World Haskell". &nbsp;I already knew it would be a fairly difficult language to grasp, but I don't think it was that bad. &nbsp;I think the main issue was the author's "examples". &nbsp;And very little seemed very "real world" about it. &nbsp;&nbsp;A good amount of the examples were in GHCI, which is Haskell's repl. &nbsp;Functional programming languages love their repls, and the authors of these books &nbsp;tend to really enjoy giving contrived and toy examples in it. &nbsp;I didn't really feel I could just walk away from the book and had enough core fundamentals in the language to be able to write a functioning program. &nbsp;Sure I could just mess around with the repl, but last I check no one writes real programs in a repl.</p>
<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The author was also extremely bad at explaining things. &nbsp;Since Haskell is very concise, it relies a lot of operators like (=&lt;&lt;) which are rarely if every explained well. &nbsp;&nbsp;People say that the chapter on monads is amongst the best, but I feel this comes from people who already code in Haskell. &nbsp;If you don't code in Haskell, very little in the book will make a lot of sense. &nbsp;And the lack of explaination is pretty bad.<br>
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 &nbsp;I think the main problem is the title "Real World Haskell". &nbsp;It's incredibly misleading because there are no real world examples. &nbsp;Just simple examples about how to remove elements of an array, or how make your code more "clever". &nbsp;&nbsp;And this is probably my criticism of the book and the "Haskell community". &nbsp;It's too clever for it's own good. &nbsp;&nbsp;And people have to understand that developers don't have time to appreciate the "cleverness" of code. &nbsp;Especially when they have requirements, and need to quickly get into the guts of a programming language. &nbsp;I felt the book to be a mixture of "too beginner friendly (due to the over-reliance of the repl)" and "lazy(due to way too many deferred explanations)". &nbsp;</p>
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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In the end it just comes across as useful only to Haskell developers. &nbsp;I feel it's probably complimentary to someone who already writes Haskell and just needs a book that fills in the gaps. &nbsp;&nbsp;It doesn't seem particularly useful for Java, Python, C++, or Javascript developers. &nbsp;As it doesn't seem very empathetic in juxtaposing concepts of any of those languages to Haskell. &nbsp;&nbsp;And it doesn't really teach Haskell well to first time developers. &nbsp;&nbsp;It also doesn't give real world examples. &nbsp;For example real developers do deal with a world outside of "pure code". &nbsp;But few examples use APIs, file i/o, databases, etc. &nbsp;I feel there is a huge chasm that exist between Haskell developers, Haskell education, and non-Haskell programmers. &nbsp;And the books are just closing the gap.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;I give the book a 2 out of 5. &nbsp;The 2 is decent, because I don't think it's useless. &nbsp;It's just not as useful as it claims to be. &nbsp;</p>
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@kannesito · 
What about the following book, have you heard about it?
Allen, Christopher, and Julie Monoruki. Haskell Programming: From First Principles.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25587599-haskell-programming

Ok, admittedly, I've got academic background (currently studying Telecommunications), but my programming background sucks / sucked. I love the way it is written didactically and it is really motivating. The first chapter can be paraphrased with: do NOT leapfrog λ-calculus!! And yeah, it was worth following the advice. It gives me the necessary info to understand the "meat" of the language in quite some detail (as far as needed in the beginning, at least to know how to look at the code, how it operates). I haven't got to the Monads yet, but be sure to hear from me, as soon as I have made it there. I will tell you whether I understood'em or not, haha ;)

Why did I get interested into the language? Because a dear friend and collegue of mine started programming the full back end (and by now also front end) of an open source baby monitoring system (https://www.gonimo.com, the GOod NIght MOnitor) in Haskell and never stopped rhapsodizing about this language. "When it compiles, it quite likely also works" were his most frequently occurring remarks :)

This open-source project can be found under https://github.com/gonimo
and he has also documented a little bit about his work:
https://eskimor.gonimo.com/
... if anyone happens to be interested, drop by and check out his dedication.

So anyhow. I will not stop learning this freak-language, even though it comes with a little pain. But ... no pain, no gain :)

Cheers,
Hannes

PS: 
I am also looking forward to see how well Cardano (which, for the ones who don't know, is also written in Haskell) will concur in the crypto world, since robustness of code is highly desired property for Blockchain stuff.  We'll see! :)
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