a Day with Haskell
I realized two important things the day before yesterday. The first is that I have programmed exclusively on Libaudioverse since the summer started. The second is that I know how to make an interpreter and, quite possibly, a compiler. Coupled with my interests (contributing to projects like Pypy, getting into grad school) and all the people who have said that compilers are a core part of CS, I've bumped it up my list a bit. My college does not give us the opportunity to take a class, so it's time to make my own.
To that end, I decided to finally learn Haskell and spent all of yesterday doing so. This has also been something on my list for a very long while. Basically, I was burned out with Libaudioverse, so it was time to do something else. Haskell is very unusual and also potentially very useful. I was actually quite impressed by how it was able to get at the core of some ideas, but there are some gotchas that prevented the code from being as clean as it could have been. I've got a commented implementation of binary search trees here and want to talk about just how strange Haskell is and why I'm actually very glad I'm learning it.
Please note that I am trying to convert some very deep ideas to English and am losing a lot of the elegance in the process. We can make nice analogies with imperative languages and real-world situations; this is not so with functional languages. Functional languages require working with them to understand them, in much the way that people say you shouldn't learn a foreign language by mapping it to your native tongue. If this post seems confusing or somehow lacking in detail, the reason is that the ideas in Haskell do not map well to English.