Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

I wouldn't describe those as being "FP concepts" - though the more you get into FP you'll run across more "academic" CS where you will see those concepts, sure.

* "Algebraic effects" are still a research topic, they aren't a feature of any production programming language today (as far as I'm aware): https://overreacted.io/algebraic-effects-for-the-rest-of-us/ - did you mean "algebraic data-types" instead?

* "Linear-programming" refers to a class of optimization problems in mathematics and statistics, it has little to do with FP.

* True dependent-types are... complicated (and seen in theorem-provers more than in any language); when most people say "dependent-types" they often really mean just "refinement-types", and while refinement-types are a feature of many FP languages, they aren't exclusive to FP: in fact you can implement practical refinement-types in any conventionally-typed (even non-FP) language with cheap value-types and user-defined implicit conversions (like C#, C++, Swift, but not Java).

> all the best articles that I've read and shared in the past have been been things that the author would probably have felt compelled to write even if no one bothered read their work

I've felt compelled to write this question on HN. Even if I don't draw anything for me, maybe someone else will. Additionally, remembering I asked this question and didn't get inspiring answer, I might finally be compelled to write my own thing without any other questions. You never know.

And if we already do meta talk: 1. Every rule has an exception. 2. Always do most exciting thing, today it's asking a question, tomorrow it's writing an article. Rule 1 works for points 1 and 2. And also works for your impressions about best articles. :)

Earlier tonight I was making a programming challenge list for experienced programmers. These are all small tasks but the question is can you do them.

Create a

1. Mandelbrot

2. Julia set

3. Ray tracer with shading and shadows of a few simple spheres

4. A simple virtual machine

5. Rewrite the first three programs in the virtual machines assembler

6. A simple language such as Forth for the virtual machine

7. Rewrite the first three programs in your implemented language

All of these 7 tasks together will likely take under 2,000 lines of code, maybe even under 1,000.

If you know what you're doing, each one individually should take under an hour.

Doing a write-up about your experience with this would be great. Each one of these tasks has tradeoffs and can reflect personality and approach.

This is version 1.0 of this, and I just came up with it a few hours ago so I'm open to slight modifications (perhaps an extremely easy game instead of one of the fractals)

> all the best articles that I've read and shared in the past have been been things that the author would probably have felt compelled to write even if no one bothered read their work

I beg to differ. Might be true for the most interesting articles, but the most useful articles are day to day stuff like How to do X in Y imho.

The difference to the other tutorials is that this one would not have prerequisites in terms of tools and services. It would not require anything but to copy+paste lines to go along. And that the format of shell commands makes the different approaches very easily compareable. And reproducable. You can put all of the commands into a script and have your own automated template to start new projects.

A single Docker container can be used like a fast, lightweight VM. And from there on it is just copy+paste.

So on a Linux machine the process would be:

    1: docker run -v $(pwd):/var/www --rm -it -p 80:80 debian:11-slim
    2: Copy+Paste the lines
    3: Enjoy the running web app