[Haskell-cafe] Haskell showcase in 5 minutes - follow-up

[Arnaud Bailly]

Hello Cafe,
Thanks to all of you who provided ideas and suggestions for introducing
Haskell. I finally went the simple way, presenting the "knapsack" problem
slightly reframed using tapas (spanish dishes). This problem is small
enough to fit in the 5 minutes time-frame and it actually illustrates some
of the salient points of the langauge: laziness of course,
list-comprehensions, monadic computations (replicateM), first-class and
higher-order functions, the REPL, integration with emacs, command-line
compiling.

Here is the code https://gist.github.com/1948301

I got a lot of positive feedback during the evening as I did some more live
coding on simple problems (fizz-buzz, fibonacci) and I ended up showing
some code I wrote doing "real stuff", notably the simple music synthesizer
I wrote (https://github.com/abailly/haskell-synthesizer) for presenting
Haskell to Paris Scala user Group and inspired of course by Paul Hudak's
book and Joao Pizani's blog (
http://joaopizani.hopto.org/en/2012/01/haskell-synth/). The meeting ended
with an impromptu panel on the disadvantages of the languages presented by
each speaker which was really hard for me given the sheer perfection of
Haskell.

One advantage I mentionned somewhat indirectly which I should stress here
is the Haskell community: reactive, vibrant and kind are a few adjectives
that spring to my mind.

Thanks again for your support,
Arnaud Bailly
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