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Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

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Re: Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

#51

Post by glogla »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #29
eblume wrote: post #3

I just restarted my investigation of Haskell yesterday. This is very sad news. Haskell is a beautiful language, and while I still struggle to write even basic programs in it I can tell that every time I solve an issue I'm having I am becoming a smarter programmer. He will be missed!

I teach Haskell and I'm working on a book http://haskellbook.com/ with my coauthor. We've been testing with reviewers and it's been going pretty well. We've even been testing with my coauthor's 10 year old https://twitter.com/argumatronic/status/593845481140133888 :) My guide for learning Haskell is here: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell You can get help in the IRC channel if you'd like as well. I don't reco…

Any idea when is it going to be finished?

Re: Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

#52

Post by coolsunglasses »

glogla wrote: post #51
coolsunglasses wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach Haskell and I'm working on a book http://haskellbook.com/ with my coauthor. We've been testing with reviewers and it's been going pretty well. We've even been testing with my coauthor's 10 year old https://twitter.com/argumatronic/status/593845481140133888 :) My guide for learning Haskell is here: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell You can get help in the IRC channel if you'd like as well. I don't reco…

Any idea when is it going to be finished?

Late Fall, early Winter. It's about 40% done right now, 1/3 manuscript is just about ready for early access.

We'll have it available for early access by the time LambdaConf happens if nothing goes badly.

Re: Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

#55

Post by bbcbasic »

killtheliterate wrote: post #40
QuercusMax wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you don't recommend LearnYouAHaskell? I'm genuinely curious.

He explains in http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...

I am following that guide to get me started. Taking the recommended courses, I finished the cis194 Spring 2013 course and I am getting through the NICTA course, with help from #Haskell on freenode IRC.

Based on my experience the recommendations are good, but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably the best courses available online. It seems someone (maybe me someday!) needs to do an equivalent of "RailsCasts" for Haskell to make this more accessible.

The NICTA course contains hard exercises building various functors, including transformers. It's a mind bender and oddly I had code that worked because the types matched up but I had no intuition as to why it actually worked! But it does raise your game to a new level.

Re: Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

#57

Post by jug »

Heaven will become beautiful now. I don't know more Haskell than I learnt at university, but even from that alone, I saw it was something special. I'll never forget that and the impression it made on me.

I particularly remember a short application I had to write down on paper on the exam; I did it well enough and I thought what I wrote was so beautiful and simple... I think Haskell developers will know what I'm talking about. The best applications almost look like magic.

If Haskell was a traditional writen language, I think it would have been pretty well known and studied, like hieroglyphs or some other language carving out its own niche. Sometimes I feel like this whole programming world has so many interesting, exciting, and thought provoking things going on within it that the rest of the world will never come to know. Haskell was one of those things to me and I think it's unfortunate that it's such a closed world.

Re: Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

#58

Post by coolsunglasses »

bbcbasic wrote: post #55
killtheliterate wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He explains in http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...

I am following that guide to get me started. Taking the recommended courses, I finished the cis194 Spring 2013 course and I am getting through the NICTA course, with help from #Haskell on freenode IRC. Based on my experience the recommendations are good, but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably th…

>but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably the best courses available online.

Definitely, this is why we're working on a book. We acknowledge cis194 and NICTA course are difficult and designed to be done as part of a class. That's also why we suggest Thompson's book as a fallback.

There isn't a book designed for an independent reader that we're happy with at present.

>The NICTA course contains hard exercises building various functors, including transformers

These things must be covered if you want to use Haskell in anger. One thing I would change in NICTA course if given the option is to make the transformers tutorial have a smoother ramp. State/StateT could be built up to via Writer/Reader and the transformer versions thereof.

That the NICTA course confronts these (Functor, Applicative, Monad, Monad transformers) and is rigorous in covering the basics along with those topics is what makes it so valuable. Most other materials either don't cover them or don't provide proper exercises.

"Show & Tell" is not good enough for getting people comfortable with these tools and sadly that's the mistake a lot of resources for Haskell make. You have to make exercises that make learners manipulate and see the structure of how these things work.

Re: Paul Hudak, co-creator of Haskell, has died

#60

Post by bbcbasic »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #58
bbcbasic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am following that guide to get me started. Taking the recommended courses, I finished the cis194 Spring 2013 course and I am getting through the NICTA course, with help from #Haskell on freenode IRC. Based on my experience the recommendations are good, but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably th…

>but when working on material like this on your own it is a slog because both of these courses are designed to be taught live. So beware. However they are probably the best courses available online. Definitely, this is why we're working on a book. We acknowledge cis194 and NICTA course are difficult and designed to be done as part of a class. That's also why we suggest Thompson's book as a fallback. There isn't a boo…

Good answers. To be clear I am not complaining. Actually I love it. I love struggling through it and the feeling of triumph when solving those problems.

I think the difficulty is a rite of passage to become a functional programmer, however smoother ramps would help, and I am sure your book will be a great help and is much needed.

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