Want you to make backed your future learning a fantastic FP language, which is on hype now?
You could study Haskell!
Following the mainstream may help you make your first money a little faster, but it will never make you special or completely confident. If you do something solely for the money or to fit the majority, you will not achieve much but only dissolve in the crowd that ran after the dominant trends.
When deciding on a programmer career, you have to choose some programming languages you want to become an expert in. And it is worth knowing that FP languages, like Haskell, allow you to understand programming more deeply. As Donald Knuth said:
“… I’ll choose words that make it [my sentence] more convincing than if I really don’t have the knowledge and somehow come out implicitly in my writing.”
If you want to do really great things, you need a deep understanding of what you do, on which your confidence as a professional is based.
Why is Haskell so good?
Haskell has been on the puff lately, and everyone is talking about it, but not many people can really go into details to explain why Haskell is so good. So, I’ve collected some of the expert developers’ opinions here.
Haskell gives the developer many new possibilities, introducing pure functions, slender type systems, immutability, algebraic data types, functional-declarative code style, etc. This is all that is sorely lacking in the most popular OOP languages today. Many concepts are now flowing there as they have proven to be useful. The set of developer tools should be as wide as possible, especially if they will become a senior or lead.
No other language can provide the same feeling of confidence in your code as Haskell, so it’s a pleasure to write in it. No other language can provide such a clear and simple syntaxis as pure functions, and typed variables give me in Haskell. For example, when programming in C ++, you can always expect undefined behaviour for some unknown reason, and you cannot completely rely on any part of the code. This makes development extremely difficult and, therefore, sometimes frustrating.
Haskell supports lazy evaluation. This means that it will calculate the necessary values in any function when it is really needed in the program, but not when the programmer wrote it.
Lazy evaluation helps reduce the load on resources and makes programs run faster and work more efficiently.
Why Haskell stands out so much
Haskell is a declarative functional programming language, so it works very differently from the popular PHP, Python, JavaScript, or other OOP languages. These are imperative or mixed development languages. Compare the difference in approaches here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_paradigms.
Haskell is not really for ordinary things like standard applications or primitive websites. But it’s great for precise computations and calculations for distributed ledgers and blockchain platform development.
Many Haskell adepts believe that developers using imperative languages should at least try to learn pure functional development for a deep understanding of the principles of programming itself and the difference between functional and imperative development.
I do almost everything in Haskell through functions. In essence, functions are sets of rules by which data is processed. The programmer’s task is to describe the function in such a way that the compiler understands it. You need to write what parameters can come to the function, what you need to do with them, and in what form you need to return the result.
An entire Haskell program is a collection of such functions and rules that can be related to each other. All data is processed strictly according to these rules, and the output is an accurate result. You can work with any data if you translate it into a language understandable form, so Haskell is often used in those areas where reliability and guaranteed accuracy of calculations are of great importance.
What Haskell is used for
In Haskell, it is easy to lay down the rules of any language, according to which language constructions are built, and to explain it to analyze this language. For example, he can divide sentences into words and prepositions, find connections between them, see if everything is written without errors, or find incorrect language constructions. This works for common languages as it does for programming languages.
Since Haskell does everything strictly according to the rules, it is a great tool for writing compilers. The task of any compiler is to take the program’s text, check if there are any errors, and execute the code. Since Haskell works great with text and does not make mistakes in the rules, it can convert commands from another language to orders for the computer.
Haskell is often used to develop financial instruments. The main requirements for which there is a guaranteed accuracy of calculations and the absence of errors. That is why corporations like to use high-precision Haskell for their internal tools, such as accounting systems for bank transactions, stock trading, risk analysis, financial monitoring tools, and others.
The accuracy of Haskell has also been appreciated by industrial application developers. It allows you to set the necessary rules and process data according to this guidance. This is what enterprises need to build decision support systems or internal audits. This relieves the burden on people and allows algorithms to more efficiently find weaknesses in a company or points for industrial growth.
Should I learn Haskell?
What do you gain from Haskell as a programmer? When working in Haskell teams, you usually deal with a small, friendly community of geek programmers. You will have to cooperate with people with bright minds who are ready to solve problems first in only mathematics so that later easily transfer the elegant and smart solution to a programming language with practically no changes since Haskell has a straightforward and logical syntax.
Of course, Haskell is not a language for everyone. Why? Here you must first learn to think and solve problems in theory, and only after, Haskell will help you very much to implement them, simply and gracefully. But if you are used to taking 3 ready-made frameworks from object-oriented programming and fastening them together with 3 lines of code while calling yourself a cool programmer, do not flatter yourself.
But! If you can do more, then learning Haskell will show you how enjoyable programming can be, and besides, working in it is well paid because of the smaller number of specialists. Knowledge of this language is helpful for all professional developers. It also makes sense to learn Haskell as your first language.
With the first programming language, you should learn programming as such because the skill of writing instructions for a computer is fundamental. Without it, further development progress is impossible. What kind of language it will be is not a decisive matter? You can choose something to your liking.
Whatever language you start with, you should understand that at this stage the most important thing is the ability to understand the problem, decompose it into simple subtasks down to the smallest parts, compose an algorithm, program it, and debug it. Do not forget that to build your career, you need to learn several programming languages and better if they were from different paradigms.
Actually, learning Haskell as a first language is even easier than learning it after years of experience in Java, PHP, C ++, and other popular languages. This is because these languages are mainly imperative and object-oriented paradigms. Their long-term use leads to the formation of mental rails, and then it becomes difficult for the developer to understand the functional paradigm.
Getting started with Haskell is likely to be a little more complicated than starting with Python or Pascal, but not much since Haskell has a fairly simple language to begin with. Problems with its study arise due to its uncommonness, since its syntax and set of basic concepts are far from the usual C-like languages, so Haskell expands consciousness. While its more advanced use, of course, requires considerable training, at the same time, Haskell can be understood by everyone.
When making this life choice, keep in mind that super-duper corporations, such as FB, build checks on Haskell, custom software languages are created on it, as well as compilers. This is an exclusive segment with excellent salaries. It makes sense to grow in this direction if you want hard tasks and decent pay for the result.
Check this source for open lectures to become a Haskell developer, regardless of whether you have experience in other programming languages. Help yourself secure your future.
