An easy-to-use Haskell learning and development environment

If you’ve ever been curious about functional programming, or have been meaning to tinker with the Haskell programming language, this is the place to start.

After working with Swift playgrounds and IPython notebooks, I’m convinced that interactive, compute-as-you-type environments are the best way to learn a new language. I wanted to learn Haskell last year, so I spent days setting up an IHaskell environment to tinker with it. I learned an incredible amount about that language in a short period of time by experimenting with it in an interactive IHaskell notebook.

Haskell for Mac takes all the hassle out of setting up a system like that, and makes it a one-click install. Not only that, but it provides a truly as-you-type evaluation of everything you’re entering. It even contains all the packages you’d need to perform advanced graphing, something that took me over a week and a huge amount of frustration to get right in IHaskell.

The interface is simple yet polished, and makes it easy to organize even multiple-file projects with resources within the playground environment.

I’m really excited about the potential for this application to speed up my Haskell learning and development process. If you have any interest in Haskell or functional programming, you owe it to yourself to get this.

Brad Larson about Haskell