Just a small repo for me to do Haskell experimentation

LeJSON.hs and Comonads.hs are probably the more interesting things I've done with Haskell

Read my long winded rant below if you're interested in my experience learning it XD

Haskell is a really elegant language. This was my first Functional Programming Language and the paradigm is really interesting. Having functions so central to the process made function composition and modularity seem trivial at times. The fact that Haskell is also pure was awe inspiring as it started becoming more "math-like" in its wonder. It seemed like this cool combination of math and programming. An example from this would be infinite data structures and how they can be used. They just make solutions so clean at times and allow you to separate your "data" from "logic". Haskell also had features that made programming so much nicer like pattern matching and the best type system I've used.

Admittedly, Haskell was really hard to truly understand at first. The syntax and making some beginner programs were fairly simple, but what was hard (but the coolest part) of learning Haskell was actually the Category theory. Now, I didn't go the deepest into it, but learning about Monoids, Functors, Applicatives, and Monads was actually really enlightening. I adored the fact that Haskell leveraged these concepts to abstract programming patterns while still retaining the elegance of a pure functional programming language. The fact that the type system of Haskell is able to express these ideas (AND MORE) so easily honestly blows my mind.

However, I had three main gripes with Haskell. The lack of "the Haskell way", Windows Support, and the ecosystem.

• While there is some idiomatic Haskell, I found that there were still so many ways to do things and that there was often legacy stuff that made learning difficult. One example would be how to deal with Strings. Especially when you start getting into using actual libraries, there are like 3 different String standards and so many different language extensions you need to know to actually used things. It becomes annoying thinking you can do something with a library and then they hit you with "nah we need you to activate 5 different Haskell Language extensions that most tutorials don't show and use Lazy Bytestring Strings." Also, having things like fmap always irked me. I feel like they should have removed the old map and generalized the Functor class to have a map method rather than having a specific fmap thing. (Also liftA vs liftM or return vs pure)
• Windows support was also quite lacking. The install was okay but many things simply did not work on Windows for me. The most annoying being input. I feel like Windows IO with Haskell is absolutely impossible. I know I could just use WSL or move to Linux (the superior OS XD) but it would have been nice if Windows support wasn't as bad
• Sadly, at least to me it felt like it, the Haskell ecosystem wasn't the most user friendly. I appreciate the vast amount of volunteer work that has gone into making some really great libraries but the ecosystem as a whole lacks a lot of clear documentation (for a layman like me) and good beginner guides. It was quite hard to learn some things (like I didn't even know about Lenses until I started using libraries) and it feels like going further in Haskell takes a lot of individual effort. While there's nothing wrong with putting in effort, it would've been a lot nicer if there were more user friendly things in the Haskell ecosystem. (I'm hopeful the Haskell Foundation will help fix this)

Overall, I really like Haskell. While I don't think I'll be using it to create any bigger projects anytime soon, I find it a really nice language. It will always hold a place in my heart 💘