[Haskell-beginners] Functional analysis and design

[Martin Drautzburg]

Hello all,

often, when I read tutorials or lectures about haskell, I am absolutely 
intrigued by the solutions presented there. It often creates this "aha" effect 
and I think "yes, this perfectly describes the problem to solve, this is what 
the problem IS".

But alas, I have difficulties to come up with equally brilliant solutions for 
my own problems. As for learning haskell, I am now pretty comfortable with it, 
but I fail to apply it to real world problems.

I am pretty good at semantic data modelling, but this technique gives me 
nothing but trouble, when I try to apply it in the functional world (while it 
works well in the OO world).

What I am trying now it asking "what do I want the system to compute in the 
first place" and then think about how to implement these top-level functions. 
Do you think that this is a good way to start?

Other than that I was trying to find some information about haskell as a 
specification language, but could not find anything. Is this a sensible idea 
at all? If not, how would you write a specification if not in haskell itself?

So if you have any pointers on how to address a non-trivial problem in 
haskell, this would by much appreciated.

-- 
Martin