I'm not going to sell you on anything. All of the things you've mentioned are true. Loosely, the multitude of string types and the state of the standard library come from the same place: the language is 30+ years old! There are many warts to be found. However, if you decide to start learning, the path is hard, especially if you come from a non-computer-science background like me. I attempted to learn Haskell... - Source: Hacker News / 22 days ago

I'm a big fan of Haskell Programming from First Principles. That's where more advanced ideas like Monads started clicking. https://haskellbook.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

Haskell Programming from First Principles[1] is extremely comprehensive, covering everything from lambda calculus to IO. For further self-learning, it might be interesting to learn about the underlying mathematical concepts, such as category theory. A deep dive into the workings of a Hindley–Milner type system might also significantly demystify some of Haskell's typing magic. [1] https://haskellbook.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

I really liked https://haskellbook.com/. It’s long, but has exercises after each chapter which I found very helpful. The first chapter is about Lambda Calculus which is kind of a meme at this point, but learning it actually did help me a lot to grok how Haskell programs are meant to fit together. Other than that, just doing some basic side projects and leaning about how to use Cabal effectively should get you there. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

Yeah! Six months after graduating from Northwestern University I quit my cushy 6-figure WFH job to move to Finland as a quasi-illegal immigrant. (I say "quasi-" because "STEM undergrad from a top university moving to a much poorer country" is, ah, not what you usually think of.) I was unemployed for over a year due to passport issues, living in a tiny vacation town of ~10,000 close to the Arctic Circle, and used... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

I began learning Common Lisp (CL) from the Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS): https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/Contents.htm When I began learning CL about two decades ago, I did not know of any other source, so CLHS was my only source back then and I think it has served me well. A popular recommendation these days is Practical Common Lisp (by Peter Seibel): https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

A quote originally (AFAIK) from the wonderful (and free!) book 'Practical Common Lisp'. https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

The Giga Monkeys Book, Practical Common Lisp is also excellent: https://gigamonkeys.com/book/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

> So it's really pick your poison; either the child controls the call, at the risk of doing it wrong or not at all, or it doesn't but then certain things become impossible. CL lets you do both in various ways: the typical way to define a constructor is an :AFTER method that just sets the slots (fields in other languages) of the object and having a lot of behavior in constructors is unusual. You can also define an... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago

There are a bunch of things to learn from Lisp: * list processing -> model data as lists and process those * list processing applied to Lisp -> model programs as lists and process those -> EVAL and COMPILE * EVAL, the interpreter as a Lisp program * write programs to process programs -> code generators, macros, ... * write programs in a more declarative way -> a code generator transforms the description into... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago