Do The Math - Learn you a Haskell-the spooky, esoteric cult classic of programming languages.

Learn you a Haskell-the spooky, esoteric cult classic of programming languages. Programming paradigms are mainly divided into "imperative programming" and "functional programming." The dichotomy isn't clear-cut, as a growing number of languages support both styles, but for our purposes it may be enough to say that in imperative programming you write code as a series of steps, line by line, while in functional programming you define mathematical functions and let the machine worry about the steps. In terms of actual functionality and usage, imperative programming is the far more common approach.

- By Sheon Han- Illustration By Samuel Tomson

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.