[Haskell-cafe] On the verge of ... giving up!

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> Then, I set out to learn Monads + Category Theory from a Math
> perspective.

This is where you went wrong. I know none of this stuff and am
perfectly happy with IO in Haskell. Read
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monads_as_Containers and then read
lots of other Monad tutorials for Haskell.

> So, I requested my institute to buy Dr. Graham Hutton's book. I would
> be getting hold of that quite soon, and am willing to start from the
> beginning.

I'm not sure this covers IO in any great detail - it will be useful
for general Haskell though.

> 1. An online judge system
> (Like http://spoj.pl).
> I had already done one for contests that were held during our
> Technical festival here, using php. The ideas are laid out. All I had
> to focus on was learning Haskell.
>
> 2. A solver for the Peg-Solitaire.
> This was more of an academic interest. I have seen Richard Bird's
> presentation on 'How to write a functional pearl, with an example' and
> was quite impressed by it. But the actual modelling might be slightly
> tricky here, and I am yet to start off with it.

I would try number 2 first. IO in Haskell can be tricky, especially
while you are learning all the other bits of the language at the same
time. Network stuff is also not as well developed in terms of
libraries as something like Python - but something like HappS should
be able to do a spoj clone easily enough. A better choice for an
initial IO application might be something like "du", then moving to an
online judge system later on.

Thanks

Neil