Thursday January 26, 2012
Dreese Lab 266
Haskell is an advanced purely-functional programming language. An open-source product of more than twenty years of cutting-edge research, it allows rapid development of robust, concise, correct software. With strong support for integration with other languages, built-in concurrency and parallelism, debuggers, profilers, rich libraries and an active community, Haskell makes it easier to produce flexible, maintainable, high-quality software.
– Haskell.org
Continuing the series on introductory Haskell programming we will talk about abstractions common to everyday Haskell. This will include I/O and you should be able to wrap your head around existing code. We didn’t make it to the abstractions last week, so this week will be somewhat abstract. Towards the end we should hopefully get something fairly practical discussed.
For those of you who couldn’t make it last week, we covered most* of the material up to and including Chapter 8 of Learn You A Haskell http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters. The topics in Chapter 8 will probably receive some attention again before moving onto the other topics.
The Haskell interpreter (ghci) is a great help in learning how things work. If you want to follow along Thursday night, you should download the Haskell Platform for your favorite operating system: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/
There is also talk of doing some practical group projects. My suggestion is going to be to work through some of the exercises in Learn You a Haskell or Real World Haskell (free online books). If you are interested in this, we will probably be organizing something like this during the meeting. If you miss the meeting but would like to be involved, it will likely be a common discussion topic in the OSC IRC channel.
– Alex Burkhart