Haskell Links
Adam Turoff, his three-part series “An Introduction to Haskell” boldly declares:
Let me start by being perfectly clear: if you are a professional programmer, then Haskell is in your future.
This direct statement will certainly be met by an ignorant scoff by many a Java and .NET programmer (in that order). The Java-based folks caught up in maintaining something they built in the 90’s probably never had the time to recognize the existence of Jaskell. And the .NET programmers still struggling with 1.1 Windows Forms for some crazy-ass reason don’t have time to understand that Haskell-like Lambda functions are all up in LINQ. The .NET folks really have no freaking excuse. They can download a one-hour, trapped-in-the-elevator speech by Brian Beckman, “Brian Beckman: Don’t fear the Monads”, and play it in the background while they get their “real” work done. The most important statement Brian makes with regard to Haskell-ness is this:
Compositionality controls complexity.
Eventually some professional programmer somewhere on Earth leapt beyond the limits of their ego and realized that the application they are working on is too complex. That “cool” XML configuration file controlling a component-based architecture has become a nightmare. The programmer actually begins to think about other ways to control complexity. There is a category theory for complexity. Enter Haskell. Period.