<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Hi everyone!</p>
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<p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">I am Nickolay Kudasov. I am CTO of GetShop.TV (a small company where we use Haskell extensively) and a teacher at Innopolis University in Innopolis, Russia where I teach a Haskell elective course to advanced undergraduates. I also have a YouTube series of short video-lectures on Haskell in Russian (these videos were part of a Haskell course at Moscow State University while I was teaching there).</p>
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<p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">The way I teach was greatly influenced by Brent's CIS 194 course (and its later incarnation by Joachim Breitner) as well as my experience with commercial Haskell. I have also been using CodeWorld lately to introduce students to Haskell, so big thanks to Chris Smith and everyone else working on it! I am also very excited about Brent's new functional teaching language :)</p>
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<p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">I do not know if I have anything yet to offer to people in this list, but I hope to learn about teaching materials and techniques others use, especially concerning university courses. I have slight interest in K-12 education as well, since I have two kids at least one of which is likely to be inclined towards mathematics and computers in a couple years.</p>
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<p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">One sort of project I am thinking about periodically is a Haskell or FP-related educational YouTube-channel (any other platform is fine, it's format that is interesting to me). There are plenty of math and programming related channels with great content already (I would like to especially highlight <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw"><span style="color:rgb(220,161,13)">3Blue1Brown</span></a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/Taylorns34/"><span style="color:rgb(220,161,13)">Welch Labs</span></a> which have series of educational videos with exercises). I have a few ideas for such an FP-channel, but unfortunately I have no spare time right now to try this on my own. However, if anyone is interested in collaborating on such a project I would definitely try to free up my schedule :)</p>
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<p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Kind regards,</p>
<p style="margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Nick</p></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">пн, 17 дек. 2018 г. в 09:28, Chris Smith <<a href="mailto:cdsmith@gmail.com">cdsmith@gmail.com</a>>:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Hi Brent,</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Sun, Dec 16, 2018 at 10:26 PM Brent Yorgey <<a href="mailto:byorgey@gmail.com" target="_blank">byorgey@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>I'm not aware of any *functional* block-based languages. If you know of any, please let me know!<br></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I don't suggest you use this with your son, but if you're curious, a few years ago, Stefan Jacholke used Blockly to build a block-based front-end for CodeWorld, as part of Haskell.org's Summer of Haskell (in one of the years that <a href="http://haskell.org" target="_blank">haskell.org</a> was not chosen for Google Summer of Code). It's still available at <a href="http://code.world/blocks" target="_blank">http://code.world/blocks</a>. An interesting example is <a href="https://code.world/blocks#PIHIp7uCWam2t0iuN9w8zXA" target="_blank">https://code.world/blocks#PIHIp7uCWam2t0iuN9w8zXA</a></div><div><br></div><div>That said, though, it's not in great shape. There's quite a lot of code involved, including a significant amount of development on a <a href="https://github.com/stefan-j/blockly" target="_blank">custom fork</a> of yet another <a href="https://github.com/awmorp/blockly" target="_blank">custom fork</a> of Blockly. It's also <a href="https://github.com/google/codeworld/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Afunblocks+label%3Abug" target="_blank">a bit buggy</a>. This should be viewed as a proof of concept, from which we learned quite a bit about the task.</div><div><br></div><div>Some of the lessons we learned:</div><div><ol><li>Type inference in the client is a big deal. One should pay attention from the beginning to maintaining a correct incremental version of type inference, which should probably be based on something like Erdi's compositional variant of Hindley-Milner. Retrofitting the client-side implementation to CodeWorld Blocks led to a demoralizing game of whack-a-mole with consistency bugs, which was ultimately abandoned before we won.</li><li>Assuming a new version were again based on Blockly, it would be important to coordinate changes to Blockly with the upstream repository. While this is a challenging cross-team coordination problem made worse by the lack of engineering resources for the core Blockly project, forking Blockly is even more challenging in the long run.</li><li>The usability of Blockly's configuration panels is quite poor indeed; enough so that I found it nearly impossible to teach the portions of CodeWorld Blocks that needed them. This includes lists and user-defined functions. One would need to come up with a better approach to this, to have hope of success. Adding buttons and controls onto the block itself would be much more promising.</li><li>Blockly-based languages desperately need a more compelling compatibility story. Making a backward-incompatible change in a text-based language can require that programmers update their code, but doing the same in a Blockly-based language can cause the code to fail to load so much that the user may just as well start over and rewrite it entirely.</li><li>Blockly is also quite poor at usability. Being block-based is no panacea. It could likely be made much nicer with some intelligent search features. One could imagine clicking a connector to get a selection of blocks that would fit into that hole, or typing the first few letters of a function name to see a selection of blocks that begin with those letters. As is, though, building anything non-trivial in Blockly feels so tedious as to be off-putting.</li></ol><div>Anyway, this is just thoughts that came to mind from that question. Of course, there are deeper answers to how to design a visual functional language, too, based on dataflow diagrams and such. Since a key part of my goal in the CodeWorld project is to teach the conventional syntax of algebraic expressions and functions, I wasn't actually so interested in those more ambitious language designs. You might be, though. If so, I hope someone else can share some information there.</div></div><div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Chris</div></div></div></div>
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