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Haskell : What is Haskell

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Haskell : What is Haskell

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Yuan Li
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What is Haskell

Haskell (/ˈhæskəl/) is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation.Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic IO.

Why it named Haskell

Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). It is named after logician Haskell Curry.

A short history of Haskell

From this website I found the brief history of Haskell.

"Once upon a time, there was a mathematician named Alonzo Church at Princeton University. Church was Alan Turing’s PhD supervisor. Church devised a mathematical model of functions called lambda calculus. Yes, this is where modern-day lambdas come from!We will explore the details of lambda calculus later in the course. For now, all we need to know is that lambda calculus captures the essence of computation. It involves function abstraction (like defining functions in Haskell) and application (like calling functions in Haskell).

Fast forward from Church in the 1930s to the early development of programming languages in the 1950s. One of the first high-level programming languages was LISP (which stands for List Processing). LISP adopted a functional style. It allowed user functions to be defined, and passed around as values. LISP lives on … more recent incarnations include Scheme and Clojure.

Fast forward again. During the 1980s, lots of researchers were inventing and extending various functional programming languages. Example languages include ML, Hope and Miranda. However research was fragmented across the various languages, and many of them did not have ‘open-source’ frameworks. So a group of academics formed a committee to design and implement a new language, which would be used as a vehicle for research as well as for teaching functional programming.

After several years of work and arguments, the committee published the first Haskell Language Report in 1990. This was a major milestone: at last there was a common functional language around which the research community could unite.
The language has grown in popularity ever since, despite an avowed aim to avoid success at all costs. There are several freely available implementations. The most commonly used is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, which has an interpreter (ghci) and a compiler (ghc). These form an integral part of the Haskell Platform. Lots of people contributed to this software ecosystem. Many of them have worked at the University of Glasgow like Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones, and Phil Wadler."

What is Haskell used for?

Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic IO. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). It is named after logician Haskell Curry.

Features

  • lazy evaluation,
  • lambda expressions
  • pattern matching
  • list comprehension
  • type classes
  • type polymorphism
  • purely functional language

Resources:

Haskell website scala-lang.org
Ebook: learnyouahaskell.com
Wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell#History

Haskell