Haskell - Overview
Haskell is a Functional Programming Language that has been specially designed to handle symbolic computation and list processing applications. Functional programming is based on mathematical functions. Besides Haskell, some of the other popular languages that follow Functional Programming paradigm include: Lisp, Python, Erlang, Racket, F#, Clojure, etc.
In conventional programing, instructions are taken as a set of declarations in a specific syntax or format, but in the case of functional programing, all the computation is considered as a combination of separate mathematical functions.
Going Functional with Haskell
Haskell is a widely used purely functional language. Here, we have listed down a few points that make this language so special over other conventional programing languages such as Java, C, C++, PHP, etc.
Functional Language − In conventional programing language, we instruct the compiler a series of tasks which is nothing but telling your computer "what to do" and "how to do?" But in Haskell we will tell our computer "what it is?"
Laziness − Haskell is a lazy language. By lazy, we mean that Haskell won't evaluate any expression without any reason. When the evaluation engine finds that an expression needs to be evaluated, then it creates a thunk data structure to collect all the required information for that specific evaluation and a pointer to that thunk data structure. The evaluation engine will start working only when it is required to evaluate that specific expression.
Modularity − A Haskell application is nothing but a series of functions. We can say that a Haskell application is a collection of numerous small Haskell applications.
Statically Typed − In conventional programing language, we need to define a series of variables along with their type. In contrast, Haskell is a strictly typed language. By the term, Strictly Typed language, we mean the Haskell compiler is intelligent enough to figure out the type of the variable declared, hence we need not explicitly mention the type of the variable used.
Maintainability − Haskell applications are modular and hence, it is very easy and cost-effective to maintain them.
Functional programs are more concurrent and they follow parallelism in execution to provide more accurate and better performance. Haskell is no exception; it has been developed in a way to handle multithreading effectively.
Hello World
It is a simple example to demonstrate the dynamism of Haskell. Take a look at the following code. All that we need is just one line to print "Hello Word" on the console.
main = putStrLn "Hello World"
Once the Haskell compiler encounters the above piece of code, it promptly yields the following output −
Hello World
We will provide plenty of examples throughout this tutorial to showcase the power and simplicity of Haskell.
