[Haskell-beginners] Looking for some pro bono haskell work

[Ertugrul Soeylemez]

"Patrick Lynch" <kmandpjlynch at verizon.net> wrote:

> ...one more project...
>
> I tried to understand Category Theory but was unable to do so...  I
> tried reading three books in regard to it and can understand the
> definition of Category...but couldn't follow any of these books past
> the first chapter and was unable to do any of the exercises in them...
> However, I did see a few links that 'graphically' showed a Category
> and another that showed some categories and how they were implemented
> in Haskell - these made the most sense to me...
> Since categories are the basis for Functors, Monoids and Monads -
> which are extensively used in Haskell and implicitly used, I think, in
> Linq - I would be very willing to participate in a project that showed
> categories and how they are implemented in Haskell...

I'd like to add that while category theory is the foundation of a lot of
concepts in Haskell, it is not strictly necessary to understand any CT
to follow them.  I, for example, write many real world applications in
Haskell while understanding, just like you, what a category is.

It is not necessary to understand on a categorical level what functors
or monads are.  You just need to be able to make intuitive sense of the
definitions and laws.  CT gives you some terminology and some connecting
lines between those, but it will not make you a better Haskell
programmer per se.

However, one shortcoming of the current base library is that some of the
expressable connections between categorical concepts are not expressed.
For example, Monad is not a subclass of Functor, even though every monad
is a functor categorically and given a monad instance it is trivial to
write a valid functor instance.  This is unfortunate, but doesn't change
my point.


> I am an independent software consultant [been doing it for 30+ years].
> I did a market evaluation of Haskell and Linq and found the following:
>    - there are page after page of Ling/C# jobs...
>    - I only saw 1 Haskell job...
> It 'begs the question': is some commercial organization going to
> implement Haskell as a product [I don't think it will be Microsoft,
> since they have introduced F#]...

While there are only few companies hiring Haskell programmers (most of
them work in the financial sector), you can very well use Haskell to
increase your own productivity.


Greets,
Ertugrul


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