[Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?

[Chris Smith]

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 11:44 -0600, aditya siram wrote:
> I was a little negative in my last message so maybe I can contribute
> something positive. If you're looking for a musical way to teach
> Haskell I did a Haskell music hackathon [1]  about a year and a half
> ago. The idea was to use Haskell [2] to play music through a
> Supercollider music server [3] .

Well, it seems like music is a good possibility for part of it.  We're
talking about a weekly class for a year, so it'll go beyond that.  I'm
sure that whatever I do, I won't be able to prevent it ending with the
programming of video games!

I did look at Haskore, and there's a lot to like about it; but also a
lot to worry about.  The documentation talks about it only being able to
do synthesis on Linux (but that documentation seems to be old; I wonder
if this is still true); it definitely suffers from "wall of modules"
syndrome -- there's no obvious top-level module with a simplified
interface that I can see... no starting point or anything beyond type
signatures, a lot of abstraction, and the apparent existence of many
different types all called named with a capital T.  Maybe, though, I can
wrap it in something more simple and usable.

In the end, though, I probably don't want to spend an entire school year
talking about sound synthesis; so things would ultimately move on.  So
this is a small part of what I'm looking at.

-- 
Chris Smith