[Haskell-cafe] Toy application advice wanted

[David Roundy]

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 11:27:41PM -0400, mikeb at manor.org wrote:
> Anyway, I'm starting to ramble, but I talked to a friend who has similar
> feelings but is actually pretty good at Common Lisp.  He suggested I
> refocus my energies, and I agree:  instead of biting off more than I can
> chew, and having to learn a whole wad of APIs that aren't really about the
> language (read: wxHaskell or gtk2hs/the like, or audio packages etc.),
> just code some really simple problems.
> 
> Like the Sieve of Eratosthenes, in all three languages.  Or a simple
> publish/subscribe framework with a "master" state holder and many slaves.
> Or quicksort.  Etc. etc.
> 
> So I'm going to head down that path right now, and try to get a feel for
> the languages in a slightly more pure fashion.  I'll still try to get
> performance metrics out of them, but I'm not going to bang my head against
> the wall learning new languages, GUI toolkits, and FFIs all in two weeks.

I think that sounds like a good idea (not doing a GUI just yet) but would
recommend that perhaps you could do something pretty impure in terms of
file or directory browsing.  That wouldn't involve going beyond the
standard libraries, but might give you some idea of the expressive power of
the languages in terms of IO actions.  I'm thinking something like a
recursive grep, or wc -l... except preferably a bit more tailored to the
sort of IO you'll have to do in your actual application.  I guess the trick
would be in finding something tough enough, since wc -l would be something
like a two-liner...
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs