Advice for Haskell beginners (2017)
Addenda (relevant to community musings today):<p>Be aware that as a small and very distributed community, the Haskell world has less power to eject bad actors than more centrally managed and resourced projects have (e.g., Golang and Rust have much more structural power to moderate). Awful and abusive people exist in the community, and it&#x27;s best to just start blocking and ignoring folks who disrespect you.<p>The amazing thing about the Haskell community is that knowledge is very well distributed throughout the community these days. The culture, influenced by academia, strongly values writing and publishing ideas rather than sharing them orally or in the workplace. This means that if you&#x27;re interested in learning, there are a ton of places and ways to do it.<p>If you&#x27;re looking for good initial connections to folks who are respectful, well informed, and unlikely to expose you to some of the frustrating cabals in the community, I&#x27;ve got a few recommendations<p>1. Gabriel Gonzales (this is his blog, and he&#x27;s @GabrielG439 on twitter)<p>2. Chris Martin of TypeClasses. I&#x27;d also list his partner in crime Julie Moronuki, but her social media interaction is reduced these days. These two focus on helping programmers get up to speed with haskell from a variety of starting points, and they care more about functional programming than haskell specifics.<p>3. Patrick Thompson of Github (@importantshock on Twitter). A fantastically skilled person who will link you to a network of amazing Haskell folks who do stuff in a positively next-generational way.<p>Two people who are adjacent to the Haskell community and incredibly interesting, but probably can&#x27;t answer direct questions for you. Worth a follow.<p>1. Dr. Edwin Brady, creator of the Idris language. He&#x27;s widely respected, humble, and has a beautiful vision for how humans and computers should interact to write programs.<p>2. Dr. Bodil Stokke (@bodil on twitter). Bodil is not so much a Haskell person these days, but she&#x27;s got a phenomenal breadth of knowledge and always has interesting things to talk about in the FP space. Worth a follow if you&#x27;re on that platform.<p>I suppose you can ask me for help too, but I&#x27;m certainly not as competent as these folks.