That's very much it. At the risk of too much information I'm partially disabled, looking after my disabled wife, and working full time. I have a very limited "bucket" of stamina and strength that I can dedicate to anything else.
On the weekend I try to get through a couple of Exercism items, and rest. I really wish I had 10x the energy to contribute to so many worthy open source projects :(
In my book, mirroring what a friend recently told me about instruments: Learn Python. Ignore everything else for 1-3 years.
The main drawback is: You won't be able to write 10^3 - 10^5 events per second throughput services. That's where you need Go, (weird) Java and C++. But I don't think these are your current main problem.
However, Python exposes you to a lot of very valuable concepts in the programming language space. If you know Python well, you easily know 80% of the language fundamentals of Java, 70% of Go or Ruby and like half of Haskell or C++. And the other half of those languages is mystical wonderous ponderous voodoo magic.
TBH IDK about Haskell. I personally love it but it requires me to take a different view on problems than most other languages I've worked with. And I did all the things you've mentioned professionally at one point or another. That said, I'd highly recommend learning Haskell to anyone who's spent most of the career using "boring" languages like Go, C++ or Java. It's eye-opening.
How deep did you get into Haskell? Did you end up writing anything non-trivial in it? Do you feel that learning Haskell made you a better programmer in other languages?
I bought a paper copy of Learn You a Haskell many years ago and got about half way through it and got pulled away and haven't gone back to it, but every so often I get this longing. I love FP (currently maining in Elixir) so I wonder if I shouldn't just try to make it happen (even though I'm strapped for time for projects as is).
I never wrote a production system in Haskell, no, and haven't worked as part of a team writing Haskell for money. I wrote some convenience utilities for myself, and did more than a fair bit at codewars.
> Do you feel that learning Haskell made you a better programmer in other languages?
Exactly that. So while Haskell as such was not professionally useful to me, having learned Haskell made me much better in Ruby, for example. And more recently when I did a lot of Rego I still find the Haskell style of thinking very useful.
As fishnchips says, Haskell is more of an introspective journey imo.
Like, Monads are fucking weird.
Until you realize that monads are more about dealing with context and making data-dependencies and side-effects explicit.
And then you start realizing how most application server frameworks are about a simple task: The framework decomposes a possibly multi-threaded server into single-threaded request handling. And then does a shit-ton of other heavy-lifting for you.
Or, on the other hand, currying is a weird thing. Until we had a decorator which takes some initial parameters and transforms every incoming thing based on these parameters. It's a decorator in java, it's currrying in Haskell.
I've learned a lot from Haskell, ML, SML and OCaml as well as Haskell at a meta-level. We've written a full compiler in OCaml in one course, and then I made it assemble microcode instructions later on as well, because it made exercies easier in that other course.
But I wouldn't do that in production. Other languages are easier to comprehend for other people.
Is it? I think it's actually extremely elegant. A function has exactly one input and returns exactly one output.
If you need two inputs, you have a function that takes one input and returns a function that takes one input and produces the output. Functions that look like they have multiple inputs are just syntactic sugar.
