Inside the Cult of the Haskell Programmer
In my first job out of college, I was assigned the task of rewriting the autocomplete feature of a search page. The original code, entombed in a decrepit codebase, was a nauseating monstrosity that others wanted no truck with. The plan was to rewrite it in TypeScript—a dialect of JavaScript—drawing on a library that incorporated some handy features from a language called Haskell.
Haskell. It sounded like a good name for a weapon—a well-sharpened blade, like scimitar or katana. The strong German-sounding plosive in its name, as in Nietzsche or Kafka, added a menacing edge. All I really knew about the language was that it was challenging and intended for math PhDs.
The rewrite could be done without knowing Haskell, technically, but I was an overeager graduate with a “challenge accepted” attitude to everything, even when it was absolutely uncalled for. I found a whimsically titled tutorial book—Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!—and spent that winter writing Haskell most evenings after work. It was like learning to program all over again.
Long before Haskell coalesced into a programming language, it was a swarm of theoretical concepts. In 1977, the computer scientist John Backus delivered an influential lecture titled “Can Programming Be Liberated From the Von Neumann Style?” In it, he argued that existing languages were becoming bloated and ineffective. It was a clarion call to evolve “functional programming” from mathematical esoterica to a practical tool.
