Preface

When I was first approached with the idea of writing Get Programming with Haskell, I was unsure of whether I should. At the time, my primary interest was in writing about probability topics on my blog, Count Bayesie. Though I had experience teaching both Haskell and functional programming in general, it had been a while, and I was frankly a bit rusty. My active interest in data science, probability, and machine learning were somewhat borne out of a personal frustration with Haskell. Sure, the language was beautiful and powerful, but in a few ugly lines of R and some linear algebra, I could perform sophisticated analysis and build models to predict the future; in Haskell I/O is nontrivial! I was hardly the evangelist to write a Haskell book.

Then I recalled a quote from J.D. Salinger in Seymour: An Introduction, where he describes the trick to writing:

Ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world ... would [you] most want to read if [you] had [your] heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.