Abstract

Haskell is a non-strict, purely functional programming language with an expressive type system. In other words, functions may never get evaluated and can’t do anything interesting (such as displaying exciting text in a terminal, for example). So does this make Haskell completely useless? It may sound like it, but the language is actually both fun and challenging to program in because it requires us to rethink our approach to writing programs. This is not without reward: programs are often more concise than their counterparts in other languages, we can easily reason about them, and we are given a stronger understanding of programming in general. In this lecture, we will introduce the key features of Haskell, assuming no prior knowledge of the language, and explore why everyone should learn it.