[Haskell-cafe] what is basic Haskell?

[Andrew Gibiansky]

The list there you have roughly corresponds to my intuitions, except for a
few minor things:

1. Functional dependencies. --- I personally have used functional
dependencies and wrestled with things like the coverage condition, and
while I know I could easily look it up and would have no trouble
understanding it, I doubt I could tell you what each of those is without
looking it up. But I've never felt that knowing that is really worthwhile -
they're just things the compiler will complain about if I run into them
accidentally, and most programmers who have written enough of their own
instances probably get them right anyways. So I'm not really sure that
understanding those is necessary for being productive on a day-to-day
basis, and they seem a bit out of place on that list. Do you have a
particular reason they're there?

2. Arrows -- I've been programming Haskell for a few years now, and only
run in to arrows *in practice* a few times. I've definitely seen a few
libraries migrating away from arrows towards applicative or monadic
interfaces instead. Do you use them often? I definitely feel like they're a
bit more on the esoteric side, while GADTs, free monads, lenses, type
families, and existential data types are things I encounter fairly
frequently. On the other hand, they seem to be a good model for FRP and
such, so maybe not. (Same goes for church encodings, but that's just a nice
bit of CS that people should know a bit :) )

On the whole, looks like a pretty good list that I agree with. Of course,
the "basic" list really includes a bunch more - knowledge of data types,
syntax, functions, laziness, etc.

-- Andrew



On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Wojciech Danilo <wojciech.danilo at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This is **very** interesting question!
> When we recruit people to our company (we are working in Haskell
> everyday), we are basing on some classification between basic, intermediate
> and advanced stuff. These sections are shown below. I would love to hear
> what others are thinking about it and what from the below stuff would be
> widely considered as "basic Haskell knowledge", which would allow for
> full-time basic Haskell work.
>
> Basics
>
>    1. type classes
>    2. instances
>    3. functors, applicatives, monads, etc (
>    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Typeclassopedia)
>    4. functional dependencies
>       1. Patterson condition
>       2. Coverage condition
>       3. Liberal coverage condition
>    5. monad transformers
>
> Intermidiate
>
>    1. lens
>    2. arrows
>    3. free monads
>    4. GADTs
>    5. Type families
>       1. closed type families
>    6. existential datatypes
>    7. RankNTypes
>    8. church encoding
>
> Advanced
>
>    1. templateHaskell
>    2. generics
>    3. continuations
>    4. delimited continuations
>
>
>
> 2014-07-25 0:44 GMT+02:00 Johan Larson <johan.g.larson at gmail.com>:
>
> What does a programmer need to know to be proficient in "basic Haskell"?
>>
>> For my money, basic programming skills are those that are required to
>> write programs for simple tasks in the common idioms of the language.
>> This means the practitioner should be able to read input from the
>> terminal or files, select/combine/reformat data, and output a result.
>> At this point, efficiency isn't really the point; only getting to a
>> correct answer without writing anything really weird matters.
>>
>> In LYAH, I'd put the boundary at the end of chapter 9, which covers
>> the IO monad. At that point the reader has studied functions, lists,
>> tuples, types, recursion, higher order functions, four major modules,
>> and algebraic data types. Actually, some of the later topics in
>> chapter 8 (functors, kinds, recursive data structures) seem more like
>> intermediate material.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> --
>> Johan Larson -- Toronto, Canada
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>
>
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