The start of a local Haskell study group

Nov 5, 2012 · 2 minute read · Comments
programmingHaskellPittsburghfunctional programmingScalaTest-Driven Development

Recently, I had a conversation with Bill, who was asking about resources for learning more about functional programming. I did some serious thinking about how to advise, but eventually decided to recommend that he use the Haskell programming language as a vehicle for getting into the theory and practice of functional programming.

(To fans of Standard ML or Caml or Scala or Clojure or Racket or other languages: I will explain my rationale later.)

Also, I recommended a particular tutorial as a decent starting point: a book available online called “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!” (seriously).

As Bill got going and Chris joined us, Bill set up a Google Group to make discussion easier. If you’re interested in joining the study group, let us know!

A project setup

Meanwhile, one of my first suggestions so far to the participants has been to get a decent serious development setup beyond just using the REPL for experimentation. In particular, as a proponent of Test-Driven Development, I believe that anyone learning a new programming language should be given the tools to immediately get a serious process going, even if only to solve trivial problems.

Since Project Euler was brought up as a source of little programming exercises to solve, I decided to create a project structure with (currently) one solved problem and a test file using HUnit and test-framework as a template one can use to set up a complete development process.

Here’s the link to my project-euler-haskell on GitHub.

Comments and participation are welcome!