I’ve not posted for a while, at least not here, but I have kept up the habit elsewhere.
If you didn’t know, I’ve been writing a few articles on Haskell and related topics for the Pragmatic Bookshelf’s in house magazine. My general aim is to talk about higher-level issues of programming and what we can get from a functional approach. The key ideas are about putting data first and about getting the programming language to fit the problem. So conceptually I try to start asking what data structures we need and what kind of transformations, then consider what we’d like from the programming language to make it easier or simpler to write the programs.
The current articles are:
- http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-08/thinking-functionally-with-haskell – an overview of modern functional programming in the Haskell style and beyond
- http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-09/thinking-functionally-with-haskell – about Haskell’s powerful type system and what lies beyond, like dependent types
- http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-10/thinking-functionally-with-haskell – a small kata example, illustrating one approach to development
- http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-11/thinking-functionally-with-haskell – on what applicative functors and monads are useful for
- http://pragprog.com/magazines/2012-12/web-programming-in-haskell (eta 5th Dec?) – programming for Javascript platforms via Fay (a Haskell subset)
One day I’d like to do a retrospective here, to restate the main points and think about what isn’t being explained clearly enough.
But soon, I need to get cracking on the next article to have it submitted before Christmas! It will probably feature Yesod, a full-scale web framework for Haskell. Or I may take it easy and just do some more Fay!
free-variable.org 