[Haskell-cafe] Re: Writing "Haskell For Dummies Or At Least For People Who Feel Like Dummies When They See The Word 'Monad'"

[Benjamin Franksen]

Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> Perhaps a single largish application could be the "end product" of the
> book. Like a game or something. You'd start off with some examples
> early on, and then as quickly as possible start working on the low
> level utility functions for the game, moving on to more and more
> complex things as the book progresses. You'd inevitably have to deal
> with things like performance and other "real world" tasks.
> It might be difficult to find something which would work well, though.

This again reminds me of 'Write yourself a scheme in 48 hours'. It is
exactly this approach, albeit on a far less ambitious level (tutorial, not
book). You end up with a working scheme implementation; ok, a partial
implementation missing most of the more advanced features, anyway, you get
something which /really works/. I have spent quite some time adding stuff
that was left out for simplicity (e.g. non-integral numbers), rewriting
parts I found could be done better, added useful functionality (readline
lib for input), improved the parser to be standard conform, added
quasiquotation, etc. pp. Had lots of fun and learned a lot (and not only
about Haskell).

Cheers
Ben