Haskell for non-Haskell's sake

[Steffen Mazanek]

Hello,

I am a student from Germany and I have used Haskell for several purposes 
as well:
- to implement and compare algorithms quickly, e.g. Travelling Salesman, 
Sorting, etc.
- to calculate state spaces and blocking probabilities in networks
- to solve some of our cryptography and computability excersises :-)
- to solve several programs of the online judge, although Haskell is 
currently not supported

Further on I have written an interpreter for RATH (exploring finite 
relation algebras using tools written in Haskell)
and in this time I use Haskell in my diplome thesis (but unfortunately 
for the sake of Haskell :-p).

Some time ago, we had some problems with our news server and installed a 
new inn. This
new inn was totally incompatible with the old one (or we were to clumsy 
to figure it out) and
so the old articles seem to be lost. So it was our task to write a 
script, which should transform the
backuped, old articles on the server into expect-scripts. I did this in 
Haskell and it worked
satisfactorily :-) I call it the "News-Reposter" *g*.

Haskell is my programming language of choice.
It is possible, to solve problems quickly and the algorithms look so 
beautiful. I miss
convenient and standardized libraries for gui-programming! I think, this 
is a serious problem.

Bye,
Steffen Mazanek

P.S.
I do my best to motivate other people to give Haskell a try, e.g. during 
a lecture about
document-description-languages I had provided a funny example, how 
useful HaXml is :-)
The program reads a xml-file with descriptions (age, iq, bust size *g*, 
all values are only estimated) of
some famous women (Britney, Madonna, etc.) and puts out a 
nicely-formatted html-file with a
final evaluation (value=iq*bustsize-100*|age-22|  *g*).
In case, that a woman is reading this list: One could easily invent a 
formula as well, which evaluates men.