[Haskell-cafe] Features of Haskell

[Clifford Beshers]

Tracy R Reed wrote:
> Jared Updike wrote:
>   
>> I was always impressed with Autrijus Tang's presentation here:
>>   http://www.pugscode.org/euroscon/haskell.xul     (view with Firefox
>> or other Gecko-based browser)
>>   
>>     
>
> Unfortunately, this presentation alone is incomprehensible to someone
> who does not know Haskell.  I suspect it would do much better with
> audio. I think Haskell really needs something like
>
> http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov
>
> and
>
> http://ia301106.us.archive.org/1/items/SeanKellyGettingYourFeetWetwithPlone/wetfeet.mov
>
> to make the point. Sean Kelly's screencasts made a big impression and
> have been very widely downloaded and have really done a lot to promote
> Plone in recent months.
>   
Interesting.  I just gave a talk to the SGVLUG (San Gabriel Valley Linux 
Users Group, which is centered at Cal Tech).  It was the first time I've 
given such a talk, half about Linspire/Freespire, half about Haskell 
features, and the other three halves were technical problems.

I looked at Tang's presentation as well, and while there were parts that 
I thought wonderful (the definition of fibonacci with parallel list 
comprehension, for example), I thought that most of it would go right 
past an audience of beginners.

I didn't get a chance to practice my talk beforehand, so there were 
rough spots, but in general I felt they got as much as could be expected 
in a whirlwind tour.  Of course, I lost them completely at the IO monad.

Writing the slides, I found that it is hard to disentangle all the 
concepts and build from the ground up.  Those of us who use it have 
forgotten just how many new concepts there are and how tightly bound 
together they are in Haskell.  As always, when you try to teach 
something you get a deeper understanding of it.  I'll see if I can't 
clean up some of the examples with hindsight and send it along to you 
and see what you think.

Cliff

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