Ask HN: Motivating projects to learn functional programming languages?

7 points by puffythefish 16 years ago | 4 comments

I've always wanted to learn a language like Haskell, Lisp, Erlang, etc., but I've never been able to motivate myself beyond the first few examples because I haven't found a way to apply it. I've found that the best way I learn is to pick up a project and learn the language/tools/API as I go along — it's strange, but it's much easier for me to lose myself working on a project than an academic exercise. I start putting all the pieces together and eventually everything just "clicks"; I reach an epiphany and can start thinking in the language.

Can anyone else relate to this? How do you learn less "practical" languages like these?

yannis 16 years ago |

I can relate partially to this. To learn a language fully you need to work on a fairly good size project and one morning you will have 'flow'. It is similar to learning a human language. You need to get to the point where you 'think' in the language and you stop flipping through a fat reference book or jumping from website to website for information.

However, I go a bit different:

(01) I try to go over all the basics and repeat simple exercises from other language books. I do the for loops arrays operators etc ... etc. I spend a lot of time here in order to remember the syntax. I hate syntax mistakes so the earlier I get proficient the better.

(02) Objects and functions break in easily

(03) The web stuff and libraries

(04) Project here. Get your last epiphany and repeat it in Lisp!

I am going through Clojure at the moment and I had to introduce an additional step to the above, an UNLEARN stage, to change my thinking to functional! Current 'epiphany project', type in Clojure code in a textbox, parse with javascript and print the results. I am at 'Hello World' :).

MaysonL 16 years ago |

Take a look at the FluidDB Weekend of Code[1] and pick a language that nobody's done yet, build a little library implementing their API in that language, and you'll end up with two new cutting-edge skills. (And a free book).

[1] http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidDB/2009/09/17/fluiddb-weeken...

JoelMcCracken 16 years ago |

I learned scheme through SICP, so I guess I can't relate. However, there is tremendous value in being able to do practical things with a language. While SICP is fun, it won't ever teach you how to use push JSON from one HTTP server to another.

I disagree that these languages are impractical, though.

daleharvey 16 years ago |

writing a chat bot is a good hello world to erlang, they are also useful and quite fun.