Haskell for the Impatient
Learning haskell is a strange journey. You will probably start with some textbook, such as ‘Learn you a Haskell’, which will take you from no knowledge, right up to enough to write programs… badly; you obviously should learn more. Real World Haskell gets you a bit further (although it’s quite outdated) but stops pretty soon as well. At this point there is no obvious path of where to go next. Occasionally there is a book on some advanced topic (such as Thinking with Types which I highly recommend), but to get to the advanced level, your only real option is reading through countless blog posts.
Although this is a big jarring for people coming from more traditional programming languages, I don’t actually think that there is anything wrong with it. Haskell is a cutting-edge language, and to be fair, no one has any definitive idea of what is good to know or what is good practice.
The downside to this is that blog posts are written by people like me, who just want to share something that they find pretty neat, and no real thought is given to their audience. I think the natural assumption is “My audience knows everything that I know, apart from the specific topic that this blog posts is about” and this is what my new blog post series aims to change.
Idea of the series
The idea is that I will write blog posts on topics that I find interesting; but unlike before, I will try to really list the prerequisite knowledge and find links to it (if I can be bothered). I will assume no knowledge of category theory or the kind of things you would know if you learnt haskell at university and I will try to cover intermediate and advanced topics. I want to get better at this sort of thing.
Where you come in
I will definitely fail. I am not a good writer and I rush things. So your job is to simple email me if you have a topic you want me to cover, if you think I was unclear at any point, or if I just need to completely change my attempt at explaining a concept.
Blog Posts
- F-algebras
- Algebraic Effects
- Trees that grow
- Lambda Calculus as a Free Monad