Learning Haskell

Introduction

Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language. This portal points to places where you can go if you want to learn Haskell.

The Introduction on the Haskell homepage tells you that Haskell gives you: substantially increased programmer productivity; shorter, clearer, and more maintainable code; fewer errors; higher reliability; a smaller "semantic gap" between the programmer and the language; shorter lead times.

There is an old -- but still relevant -- paper about Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes. More recently Sebastian Sylvan wrote an article about Why Haskell Matters. And there is a table comparing Haskell to other functional languages. Many questions about functional programming are answered by the comp.lang.functional FAQ.

Implementations

	Messages	Size	Tools	Remarks
Hugs	+/-	++	-	Fast compilation; used a lot for learning Haskell and rapid code development. See also WinHugs.
GHC	+	-	++	Many language extensions; generated code is very fast
NHC	?	+	++	Profiling, debugging, tracing
Yhc	?	+	?	Compiles to bytecodes. Runtime easily portable. Still under heavy development.
Helium	++	++	-	No type classes (yet!) and thus incompatible with most material on this site. Made for teaching/learning.

Books and tutorials

Tutorials	Textbooks
A Tour of the Haskell Prelude (i.e. predefined functions) Yet Another Haskell Tutorial (best tutorial available online) Two dozen short lessons A Gentle Introduction to Haskell (classis text) Haskell-Tutorial Online Haskell Course (German) Haskell for C Programmers Hitchhikers Guide to Haskell Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours Tackling the Awkward Squad (on I/O, interfacing to C, concurrency and exceptions)	The Haskell School of Expression Haskell: the Craft of Functional Programming Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell An Introduction to Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell Algorithms: A functional programming approach The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths, and Programming
Reference	Course Material
Haskell Newbie Tour of the Haskell Syntax Haskell Reference Haskell Reference Card A tour of the Haskell Monad functions Tour of the Helium Prelude Some common Hugs error messages Some Haskell Idioms Questions and Answers (old Haskell wiki)	Programming in Haskell, Chalmers CS 11 Caltech Functional programming: course notes (English, Dutch, Spanish), slides in Dutch CS1011: Tutorials, lab exercises and solutions

Check Books and tutorials for a more comprehensive list.

(perhaps these pages can be merged somehow, or the more introductory material can go on this page, and the advanced books and papers can go on a different page?)