Tackling the Awkward Squad

It's been a long time since I've blogged a new post.

Some of the time it's because I start a topic, and never finish it, leaving behind a mess of draft posts. But most of the time, it's because I have nothing interesting to say.

Today, I have something interesting to say:

Haskell is full of lazy-sugary-pure-functional goodness.

There. I said it.

If you have never used Haskell, now would be a great time to start. I'm not going to pimp it too much, because there's a huge community out there who are already doing that quite well.

Haskell will bend your mind. Haskell will make you feel young again. Haskell will save the cheerleader.

And if you have already been learning Haskell, and plan to do serious work with it, you need to know how to tackle the awkward squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls.

I'll defer to Simon Peyton Jones from Microsoft Research, Cambridge in his awesomely awesome paper: Tackling the Awkward Squad.