Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Introducing Haskell

As always, to understand why a language embraces a certain set of compromises, you should start with the history. In the early and mid-1980s, pure functional programming splintered across several languages. The key concepts driving new research were lazy processing, as we encountered in Clojure, and pure functional programming. A group from the Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture conference in 1987 formed and decided to build an open standard for a pure functional language. Out of that group, Haskell was born in 1990 and revised again in 1998. The current standard, called Haskell 98, has been revised several times, including a revision of Haskell 98 and the definition of a new version of Haskell called ...