[Haskell-cafe] What is your favourite Haskell "aha" moment?

[Vanessa McHale]

I have several short examples that I quite like:

#1: changes a probability density function into a cumulative density
function

|

cdf :: (Num a) => [a] -> [a] cdf = drop 2 . (scanl (+) 0) . ((:) 0)

|

#2: enumerate all strings on an alphabet (this uses laziness!)

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allStrings :: [a] -> [[a]] allStrings = sequence <=< (inits . repeat)

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  ||

#3: enumerate the Fibonacci numbers (this one uses laziness too)

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fibonacci :: (Integral a) => [a] fibonacci = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+)
fibonacci (tail fibonacci)

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#4: Return all subsets of a list

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allSubsets :: [a] -> [[a]] allSubsets = filterM (pure [True, False])

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I also have two blog posts I wrote that contain lots of short examples.
The first contains lots of short-but-interesting programs and the second
contains examples of how expressive Haskell is (by doing the same thing
multiple times):

http://blog.vmchale.com/article/haskell-aphorisms
http://blog.vmchale.com/article/sum

On 07/11/2018 07:10 AM, Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell-Cafe wrote:
>
> Friends
>
> In a few weeks I’m giving a talk to a bunch of genomics folk at the
> Sanger Institute <https://www.sanger.ac.uk/> about Haskell.   They do
> lots of programming, but they aren’t computer scientists.
>
> I can tell them plenty about Haskell, but I’m ill-equipped to answer
> the main question in their minds: /why should I even care about
> Haskell/?  I’m too much of a biased witness.
>
> So I thought I’d ask you for help.  War stories perhaps – how using
> Haskell worked (or didn’t) for you.  But rather than talk
> generalities, I’d love to illustrate with copious examples of
> beautiful code.
>
>   * Can you identify a few lines of Haskell that best characterise
>     what you think makes Haskell distinctively worth caring about?  
>     Something that gave you an “aha” moment, or that feeling of joy
>     when you truly make sense of something for the first time.
>
> The challenge is, of course, that this audience will know no Haskell,
> so muttering about Cartesian Closed Categories isn’t going to do it
> for them.  I need examples that I can present in 5 minutes, without
> needing a long setup.
>
> To take a very basic example, consider Quicksort using list
> comprehensions, compared with its equivalent in C.  It’s so short, so
> obviously right, whereas doing the right thing with in-place update in
> C notoriously prone to fencepost errors etc.  But it also makes much
> less good use of memory, and is likely to run slower.  I think I can
> do that in 5 minutes.
>
> Another thing that I think comes over easily is the ability to
> abstract: generalising sum and product to fold by abstracting out a
> functional argument; generalising at the type level by polymorphism,
> including polymorphism over higher-kinded type constructors.   Maybe 8
> minutes.
>
> But you will have more and better ideas, and (crucially) ideas that
> are more credibly grounded in the day to day reality of writing
> programs that get work done.
>
> Pointers to your favourite blog posts would be another avenue.  (I
> love the Haskell Weekly News.)
>
> Finally, I know that some of you use Haskell specifically for genomics
> work, and maybe some of your insights would be particularly relevant
> for the Sanger audience.
>
> Thank you!  Perhaps your responses on this thread (if any) may be
> helpful to more than just me.
>
> Simon
>
>
>
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