I have been interested in functional programming languages for some time now. Especially Elixir. I recently began to listen to some of the Changelog Podcast episodes and ran across an interesting interview with the creators of Haskell Programming from first princples. It is from a linguist and a Haskell programmer, the linguist never programmed before Haskell or was very much into computers. It seems very inspired by some of the same philosophy of Launch School, develop a very strong foundation to build upon a programming skillset. You can listen to the episode, here. They both ended up co-writing the book, with her making sure everything made sense to her, a programming newbie. I have already progressed into Chapter Five of the book, even went through the first chapter that covered Lambda Calculus (something, I didn’t really think I could do or understand). It is probably one of the most approachable programming books I have ever read.
About a week and a half after starting the book, the University of Glasgow decided to have a beginning Haskell course by two of their professors for free online. This university had a lot of the originators of Haskell, even the main compiler is often referred to as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
It seems a lot of things have been coming together all at once for me to check out this language, so taking a break from learning Ruby to see where this side road takes me. One of the authors of the Haskell Book and a number of pretty decent Haskellers are also on a few of the Haskell chat rooms on the Functional Programming Slack Channel.