I had no real expectations for Haskell when I started to learn it. Now, after going through a few books on it, I've been unable to get to the point where I want to really dive in and attempt my "go to" project of building a ray tracer with it. It's been very good to see other ideas about building software, but I haven't gotten over that "hump".
There is a language that I feel differently about after only a few days: Scala. I've known of it's existence for a long time, but never really looked at it. Then I started listening to the CoRecursive podcast, and the host, Adam, works in Scala. Around that same time, I saw some Haskell people posting about people attempting to "de-platform" a Scala person. Well, that person was John De Goes. I've found him to be nothing but helpful and pretty nice online. He's also contributed a concurrent library called ZIO to the Scala world.
So, with all that, and my slight dissatisfaction with the Haskell language (and community) I finally "committed" in my head to learning Scala.
I haven't found "the right book" yet, but I did discover the Scala exercises site. So far, I like the way they combined reading with answering questions via fields that are checked with Scala. I started with the track called "Scala Tutorial". It is providing a little background and "big picture" as well as the more straight forward facts about language features. I'll need to read a little more before I learn how to organize a project and can begin muddling through The Ray Tracer Challenge, though.
Scala seems to tick all my boxes: it is FP (and OOP FWIW), has a compiler(I just like that step), is probably pretty fast (being on the JVM), but also allows for native binaries, and has browser/Web Assembly targets. I think the "big ideas" from Haskell are in there, so I'm hopeful and excited about it.
For my listening pleasure
Listening to podcasts has really grown on me over the last few years. Now that I'm working from home full time due to the Covid-19 pand...

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