Usually when I learn a new programming language, I’ll hang out on its mailing lists and IRC channels, learning from the answers given to other people’s questions, and asking my own. After a month or two, I usually feel fairly good with my abilities; that I could answer most of the questions, and understand most of the questions.

Well, I’ve been using Haskell for about 6 months now. I really like Haskell, and it’s a great language to use, and it’s already my preferred language.

But here’s what’s unique about Haskell. The more I use it, and the more I participate with the Haskell community, the more I realize just how much there is that I could learn. And it seems that I’m not alone with that feeling.

I wonder why Haskell is unique this way.

I’ve started a new Drupal site, The Haskell Sequence. Its focus is on news and discussions relating to the Haskell programming language. People seem to be enjoying it so far.

Things I want to do in Haskell:

• Bindings for zlib and bz2lib interfaces
• Find suitable ncurses bindings
• Bindings for CDK
• ZIP and tar file reading
• dpkg, apt, debconf, and/or debhelper tools or bindings
• perl and/or python bindings, ala perl4caml
• add some features to HSQL
• JDBC backend for HSQL via the haskell-java bridge
• DBI backend for HSQL via my mythical perl interface

Here’s an interesting read from Joel on Software: Advice for Computer Science College Students

Here’s an interesting page on the Python wiki: PythonVsHaskell. It seems a lot of Haskellers come from a Python background. It’s a remarkably fair piece, although both the Python and Haskell example code are poor examples of language features.

I discovered Haskell not long ago. I even wrote a bit about my initial impressions of it.

This is an amazing language. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much fun programming. The Haskell community is also great; there are more geniuses there than anywhere I’ve seen before.

If you’re new to Haskell, try reading Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming, 2nd Ed.. Or, if you want something online, try Yet Another Haskell Tutorial.

This is a great story from a guy who got laid off from Apple, but kept working anyway. A good read. (Original link)