Learning Haskell prior to Idris or vice versa?

[Joshua Horwitz]

Hi everyone.  I am currently new to Idris, but not to functional programming.  I do not know Haskell extremely well either.  I was wondering, is it recommended to learn Haskell in depth prior to learning and working with Idris?

[zenten]

Personally I'm just going with Idris and never have worked with Haskell. That said, in the beginning sometimes documentation for Haskell beginners has been useful for Idris.

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018, 09:14 Joshua Horwitz, <joshua.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone.  I am currently new to Idris, but not to functional programming.  I do not know Haskell extremely well either.  I was wondering, is it recommended to learn Haskell in depth prior to learning and working with Idris?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Idris Programming Language" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to idris-lang+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Alexander Gryzlov]

Yeah, I've also never really learned Haskell, though I did work with PureScript before.
IMHO knowing how the syntax works and some rough understanding of Applicatives/Monads/Traversables/GADTs should be enough to figure out the rest.
The Idris book also explains everything from scratch nicely.

Alex

[Jefferson Carpenter]

I agree with the others: Haskell is not a prerequisite for Idris. Quite
to the contrary, knowing Idris can significantly aid you in knowing when
to use some of Haskell's type system extensions.

You could start with Idris, and later rewrite in Haskell for performance. :V

[Marko Dimjašević]

I might be wrong, but to me it makes all the sense to know Haskell when
learning Idris because there is much more documentation and resources
to learn from for Haskell than for Idris.

I had my introduction to FP with the Functional Programming in Scala
book. While working on exercises from the book, on the accompanying
wiki book authors often used Haskell code snippets and used references
to resources in Haskell (including research papers). Therefore, in
order to learn material from this Scala book well, you're supposed to
know Haskell.


The Type Driven Development with Idris book is nice, but it is not an
introductory book to FP. It already assumes familiarity with concepts
such as monads and makes references to Haskell every now and then.


To sum it up, given the importance of Haskell in the FP community in
the last ~30 years, many resources are in Haskell, so it makes sense to
learn it before or along with Idris.

If you're planning to contribute to Idris development, you'll need to
learn Haskell because Idris is implemented in Haskell.


--
Regards,
Marko Dimjašević <ma...@dimjasevic.net>
https://dimjasevic.net/marko PGP key ID: 1503F0AA
Learn email self-defense! https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org

[zenten]

I disagree. Having a goal of never learning any Haskell whatsoever is silly of course, especially since the syntax is so similar, but the question was about learning Haskell first, and for that I don't think it's necessary at all before learning Idris.

As to contributing, there is a *lot* of work needed in libraries and tooling that does not require writing any Haskell code.

[Gregg Reynolds]

On Jan 5, 2018 8:14 AM, "Joshua Horwitz" <joshua.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone.  I am currently new to Idris, but not to functional programming.  I do not know Haskell extremely well either.  I was wondering, is it recommended to learn Haskell in depth prior to learning and working with Idris?

Well it would not hurt but it is not necessary. I would recommend Coq instead. To me the major selling point of Idris is the proof stuff. But learning how to do it is non-trivial. You can find lots of good info on how to do proofs in Coq online, most of which (I think) is applicable to Idris.

Hth, 

Gregg