[Haskell-cafe] Haskell showcase in 5 minutes

[Arnaud Bailly]

Great ! Good to have some support. Hope you will like it, I think I got
something worthwhile that fits in 5 minutes flat.

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10:46 AM, Yves Parès <yves.pares at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, but in 5 minutes I take it they won't have time to ask questions
> before your presentation is over.
>
> I haven't thought about parallel computing but it's one of the many assets
> of the language.
> The problem IMHO with STM is that it relies on too many Haskell elements
> to be grasped in 5 minutes. Monads, Monoids, you name it. You can't still
> present it, but bare in mind people will just understand the vague idea.
> There are so many cool things to show... ;). (But that's true for any
> expressive language)
>
> Oh, BTW I'm coming to the Battle Language tonight.
>
>
>
> 2012/2/28 Arnaud Bailly <arnaud.oqube at gmail.com>
>
>> Thanks for your support. I would really like to do this but 1) the talk
>> is tomorrow evening and 2) I do not have time in the interval to learn
>> yesod and/or gloss enough to be confident that I will not botch anything in
>> a 5 minutes time frame.
>>
>> I did recently a 2-hours long talk with same purpose (introducing Haskell
>> to an audience of mixed-level Scala programmers), using some code to
>> produce sound and music, up to a web server for generating wav files from
>> "scores", and I had to make giant steps in the last 15 minutes to get to
>> the web stuff. There was a lot of questions right from the start on various
>> "strange" aspects of the language : type inference, laziness, generalized
>> tail recursion, monadic I/O, point-free definitions and I barely managed to
>> keep some time to show how easy it is to write a web server with simple
>> HTML combinators (I discovered miku in the process).
>>
>> I timed myself on the menu problem and I am a little bit under 5 minutes,
>> given I want to explain quite a few things in the process: what you can do
>> with lists, what you can do with pairs, how to simply generate all the
>> combinations of elements of a list, how to map a function on list, how to
>> use list-comprehensions to integrate everything into a concise form and how
>> to avoid combinatorial blow-up through laziness.
>>
>> I also would love to have the time to show some cool concurrency stuff
>> following your suggestion. I will try to pack this tomorrow.
>>
>> Thanks a lot again for your advices,
>>
>> Arnaud
>>
>> 2012/2/28 Ertugrul Söylemez <es at ertes.de>
>>
>>>  Arnaud Bailly <arnaud.oqube at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> > Thanks Yves for your advice. And I agree with you that too much
>>> > laziness may be mind-blowing for most of the audience, yet this is one
>>> > of the characteristics of Haskell, whether or not we like it and
>>> > whatever troubles it can induce.
>>> >
>>> > I really think the knapsack is simple, not too far away from real
>>> > world and might be demonstrated with live code in 5 minutes. I will
>>> > have a look anyway at more "spectacular" stuff like gloss or yesod but
>>> > I fear this is out of scope.
>>>
>>> Gloss is definitely not out of scope.  It is to simple 2D graphics what
>>> Yesod is to web applications.  I write two-minutes visualizations using
>>> it all the time.  Of course if you want to show something great, you
>>> shouldn't fear learning it first.
>>>
>>> Also showing the language features, despite their greatness, makes
>>> people go like:  "Ok, that's great, but I can do it in my language using
>>> <insert control construct here>".  If you really don't want to go for
>>> something amazing like Diagrams, Gloss or Yesod, I really suggest at
>>> least bringing the run-time system into the game.  Show concurrency, STM
>>> and parallel evaluation.  Show how you can write a full-featured finger
>>> server in five minutes that is fast, secure and amazingly readable.
>>> Something like that.
>>>
>>> Math problems amaze Haskellers, not programmers in general.  Show how
>>> Haskell solves practical problems, for which there is no simple solution
>>> in more common languages.  Don't show why Haskell is also good.  Show
>>> why Haskell is /a lot better/.
>>>
>>>
>>> Greets,
>>> Ertugrul
>>>
>>> --
>>> nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
>>> http://ertes.de/
>>>
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>>>
>>
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