Saturday, January 18, 2014

Beginning with Haskell

I just gave myself permission to spend some time learning a new programming language, and here are my notes on my initial effort. I bet anyone who has read this, has on their radar, to learn some functional programming language. I chose Haskell. Judging by the experiences of others attempting the same thing, and with vastly more neural firepower than me, maybe that is a brave decision !

So, yes, Haskell is daunting from the outside, but I am only first checking out if it is really possible to make any progress without being an expert in Category Theory or Type Systems ... After all, Haskell is supposed to be very general purpose. Can it give me some prop by allowing a humble "Hello World" come out easy ?

Here is one of the first programs I attempted : calculating the 'n'th Fibonacci number.

With Haskell, this is a first attempt,

fib n
       | n == 0 = 0
       | n == 1 = 1
       | n > 1 = fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)


So terse and clean. I could challenge someone to write a specification of the Fibonacci program in plain English and in fewer characters. Even without any introduction to the syntax, we can see through this affair easily, as if someone just wrote the pseudo code. Of course, as horribly performing as a naive C++ program following the same pattern ! Calculating the 30th Fibonacci takes upwards of 5 seconds and if someone asks for the 60th Fibonacci, this program won't return before the Haley's comet and much later. Exponential algorithmic complexity can bite hardest, even with Haskell.

So here is a result after more hours of reading this fantastic introductory online book named "Learn You a Haskell" :

fib_improved n = fst $ fib_helper n (0, 1)

fib_helper 0 (a, b) = (a, b)
fib_helper n (a, b) = fib_helper (n - 1) (b, a + b)


Somehow, this is equally short as the earlier version but is super fast. Asking for the 100th Fibonacci instantly gets me this result : "354224848179261915075" !

The last line of this code tells the whole story, which is using recursion to iterate over a "tuple" repeatedly and transforming the tuple in the process. Probably this textual explanation does a far worse job (at explaining) than what the single line of Haskell makes obvious. The first two lines are just special cases and presentation.

The patterns I see so far are twofold :
1. Recursion is cool, but the algorithmic considerations are paramount. Haskell, with its principles about immutable data, presents additional twists to the efficient coding game. We need to worry about unnecessary copying (to implement data immutability), and how not to blow up the stack even while using recursion.
2. One of the techniques to make things efficient in Haskell is to pass additional arguments to function calls and "build" an answer through them, instead of first calling the function and then processing the returned data from a function. That is what the second version of the Fibonacci program does differently from the first.

Encouraging !


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