[Haskell-cafe] Tutorial on Haskell

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Friends

I have agreed to give a 3-hr tutorial on Haskell at the Open Source Convention 2007
        http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2007/

I'm quite excited about this: it is a great opportunity to expose Haskell to a bunch of smart folk, many of whom won't know much about Haskell.  My guess is that they'll be Linux/Perl/Ruby types, and they'll be practitioners rather than pointy-headed academics.

One possibility is to do a tutorial along the lines of "here's how to reverse a list", "here's what a type is" etc; you know the kind of thing.  But instead, I'd prefer to show them programs that they might consider *useful* rather than cute, and introduce the language along the way, as it were.

So this message is to ask you for your advice.  Many of you are exactly the kind of folk that come to OSCON --- except that you know Haskell.   So help me out:

        Suggest concrete examples of programs that are
                * small
                * useful
                * demonstrate Haskell's power
                * preferably something that might be a bit
                        tricky in another language

For example, a possible unifying theme would be this:
        http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_unix_tools

Another might be Don's cpu-scaling example
        http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2007/03/10

But there must be lots of others.  For example, there are lots in the blog entries that Don collects for the Haskell Weekly Newsletter.  But I'd like to use you as a filter: tell me your favourites, the examples you find compelling.  (It doesn't have to be *your* program... a URL to a great blog entry is just fine.)  Of course I'll give credit to the author.

Remember, the goal is _not_ "explain monads".  It's "Haskell is a great way to Get The Job Done".

Thanks!

Simon