Haskell calls to me

TLDR : The old itch is scratching again

I always liked programming. It’s one of those things where you battle not against other people, but against yourself and your own mind. I always loved puzzles, and so I naturally gravitated towards things that would help me solve them.

For the most part, as I grew up, the puzzles I wanted to solve grew larger and larger, taking me further away from my computer as I became disillusioned with the world that I was a part of (A whole nother story I will talk about one day).

And yet, I never lost my love of programming, nor my thirst for knowledge of new languages (both actual ones and programming ones). I dabbled in Russian, German (Ich bin gern Bier!), Bengali (I could actually read it fluently at a point), Sanskrit (I took 2 months of courses before I had to drop it due to time constraints. I do wish to revisit it again) and most recently, French. On the programming side, C, C++, C#, APL (I dabbled a bit and I like the way it looks), python, kotlin + other languages that I saw being used over the years (I even attempted to learn Chapel and put it on my resume at some point in time. Lel).

The reason I mention all that is because recently, through weird circumstances, I’ve come into touch with Haskell. Seems like the universe and me ought to have a word about corrupting influences, since I’m tempted to learn the whole language, if only as a hobby.

I’ve already installed the required stuff, so all there is to do now is to actually learn the language. I’ll document the ups and downs of this journey (if I lose interest, I shall document that too), so that whatever problems I face can hopefully be avoided by you (if they can’t, you may take solace in the fact that I have suffered too).

I suppose it’s time to learn some functional programming.

Note : I actually did learn OCaml for my compiler class during my 3rd year and became quite good at it. Sadly, as with all classes, I forgot most of it by the next semester, including all the fun stuff. I suppose relearning functional programming with Haskell is going to be fun again.