possible collaboration on tutorial with study group?

[David Alan Black]

Hello --

I'm writing at the suggestion of Shae Erisson, who mentioned to me
that there was some interest in writing a collaborative online Haskell
tutorial.

I happen to be involved in organizing something called the Language of
the Year project (LotY), which, in brief, involves following up on the
advice offered by the Pragmatic Programmers, that advice being that
programmers should try to learn at least one new language every year.
(See <http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com>, where there's a Language of
the Year link.)  The purpose of LotY is for people who are basically
capable of teaching themselves new programming languages (not
programming novices) to do it in a structured and somewhat
synchronized way -- which, for some of us, may be the difference
between not doing it and really doing it.

Now, here's the thing:

Our language of the year for 2002 is Haskell -- which means that a
whole bunch of programmers are just now entering into a worldwide
Haskell-learning support network.  There are various books and
resources available to us, of course, and that's fine.  But when Shae
mentioned that there's talk of a new Haskell tutorial coming into
being, that got me thinking.

We've got a rather large group of programmers about to learn Haskell,
and we might have some Haskell programmers who want to write a new
tutorial.  Would it be possible, perhaps, to bring those groups
together?

What I'm thinking is that we, the LotY people, could serve as tutorial
testers, while at the same time the tutorial under construction could
help us learn Haskell.  We could try out exercises, point out
unclarities (or clarities for that matter), and generally troubleshoot
the project.  And there'd be something in it for us, obviously.

So, if anyone's thinking along tutorial-writing lines, and would
like some tutees, please contact me and we can try to weave that into
to the LotY project.

Thanks --


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav