[racket] Offtopic: Favorite resources for mastering SML?

From: Sean Kanaley (skanaley at gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 4 11:44:01 EDT 2013

I can't speak to ML vs. Haskell starter-friendliness but I can provide a 
link to a free online Haskell book:

http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/

It's the Haskell equivalent of "Practical Common Lisp".

If you end up liking Haskell, the book Haskell School of Expression is 
very good.  It takes you through the construction of DSLs for functional 
reactive programming (FRP), an imperative language to control robots 
(simulated on screen with simple graphics), and one to describe music in 
the abstract and then convert it to a MIDI file.  It's more heavily math 
based, often asking for proofs as exercises, but if that's not what you 
like it's not really necessary to do them anyway.

Note that I'm not attempting to persuade you from ML and the 
recommendations already given, merely sharing what I personally know 
better...though I will say that the Haskell type system to include its 
classes, families, functional dependencies, transformers, GADTs, etc. is 
probably the best one in existence, or at least in common use...

On 07/04/2013 10:36 AM, Grant Rettke wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One of my current projects is to master as functional and statically
> typed programming language. Having discussed and debated it years ago
> (partially on list here, too) the conclusion was reached that SML
> would be a nicer place to start than Haskell or Clean. Fifteen years
> after its release, there seems to be a lot of knowledge but not a ton
> of resources exactly. There are a lot of dead links and books out of
> print (working off the SML/NJ resource list). I'm wondering of ACM's
> digital library is a good place to start.
>
> Last week I worked through _ML for the Working Programmers_ which was
> great but didn't get into the details in a way that I would have
> expected (went from 10mph to 100mph instead). Up next is _The Little
> MLer_ and Harpers _Programming in Standard ML_.
>
> This list's members have a breadth and depth far beyond most, so I'm
> wondering if I could get your help here and learn about your favorite
> learning SML resources.
>
> Best wishes,
>


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