One important parameter in learning a new language is the language’s approachability. I remember the difficulty I faced when learning Java. I was asked to know things like package, static function, etc. I was kept in the blank about these features till I reached the these trails in my learning. This is disappointing, and can intimidate learners from learning such language.

Haskell, just like Python (and other languages like Ruby, Perl, Groovy, etc.) provides a simple interactive shell called ghci. This allows one to immediately jump into Haskell, experimenting with its syntax without further ado.

Today visited the Chennai Book Fair. And in pursuit of my New Year Resolution, I bought Real World Haskell book. I am running Mint Linux, and installed the GHC compiler thus:

$ sudo apt-get install ghc6
$ sudo apt-get install libghc6-mtl-dev