Haskell, the Lego of programming

I'm unsure of what train of thought this article with follow, or what its main idea is supposed to be. But here I go.

Haskell is a functional programming language. It's "functional" as in "mathematical function", and it was designed by mathematicians. It's not the only one (I'm sure most of you remember the great Lisp), but it's special in its own way, mostly due to the fact that the guys that made it took some rather obscure concepts and integrated them into the language.

Haskell not only describes programs as functions, but it also describes them as equations. That's far, far away from what one would expect from most mainstream programming languages, although it's not that special: we all did it before in school when writing down function definitions, or trying to find a reasonable explanation of why some polynomial has no real roots, or doing integral calculus, and so on. Haskell is a computational expression of these concepts, nothing more, but nothing less either, since it's quite a big thing to be able to describe hard, formal facts as programs.

Programming with functions, not any functions, but some really weird morphisms that have types attached to them, is very much like fitting Lego pieces together¹: you combine a couple of little pieces to make a bigger piece, which then you use to make something useful, or maybe just fun. Of course, like all programs, Haskell programs have their own set of problems, given that there is no abstraction heaven in reality; more like an abstraction hell, actually. However, under a keen mind and a pair of trained fingers, such a language can provide a smooth, sometimes even enjoyable ride through hell.

So what's the point of all this?

Well, it's possible that you have a child, and he or she is, at his or her fragile age, very open to new things, technology, shiny things, fun stuff. My advice to you is not to hesitate: grab a Scheme or Haskell interpreter and teach your kid how to play with numbers, strings, diagrams, web pages, all the stuff that makes today's technology worthwhile. Let them go to an introductory course, but make sure that doesn't stifle their creativity. They are after all brilliant minds in the making. I'm not a psychologist, but I can suggest that you spare some time and study with them, and play with them, as any good parent should do.

Or maybe you're not a parent. Maybe you wanted to learn more statistics in college but never got around to it. You keep hearing about big data, analytics and other buzzwords which gravitate around one thing and one thing only: mathematics. Or maybe you're an experienced programmer, or an actor. To be honest, I don't think it makes any difference: go and learn a "high-level" language, one that's more "formal", one that challenges your thinking. I'm not going to suggest you to learn APL², but really, Scheme's a great language for messing around. Or maybe you're a Java programmer and you'd like to go try Scala or Clojure, or you're into .NET and F# might be closer to your mindset. Whatever, just find one or two or three languages and write something useful, like a program that does your bills or a porn crawler.

Yes, I know, I'm biased, but I also happen to be right. It's not like I get any pleasure from it, but I'm hoping that fluttering it in front of everyone will make a difference.