Well, this weekend I dived in with Haskell and started to make my way through The Haskell School of Expression. So I’ve been exercising neural pathways that haven’t seen a treadmill in a while, C++ programmer that I am. Overall, it’s been going well, and it’s giving me the feeling that Haskell is a very nice language. Also, Haskell mode for emacs is just fine. However, there are a few areas where Haskell seems rough around the edges.
First, the Haskell Graphics Library doesn’t compile for me – no x86_64 target exists! So I had to switch from GHC to Hugs, which had it built in. I still harbour hopes of a native-compiled HGL, but when I become an experienced Haskell programmer, I foresee a future of library and FFI pain.
Second, although I’m generally not too bothered with the Haskell way of indentation being vital to syntax, I have hit a problem that seems to be very common (even bothering experienced Haskellers). And to boot, Hugs’ error message is obscure (“unexpected ;”? I don’t even have any ;’s!).
Anyway, I’m up to the stage of drawing snowflake fractals and Sierpinski triangles/gaskets.