Haskell Continued...

My meetup to learn Haskell was a success in the sense of meeting new people. There have been a core 5-6 that have shown up with varying levels of Haskell knowledge. I think we gave it an earnest effort with our original book choice.

At this point, some people were looking for a project, and some showed interest in related languages. I have chosen to continue down the Haskell path, but this time with another book.  I like the approach of this book much better and am able to follow along much more than before.

Now I still don’t understand all of it but these things take time. ;)  The code related to this book is available here.  So, that is what I’m doing with Haskell for the foreseeable future.

Since there were other interests, and we weren’t really going through the book anymore, we did decide to move the group in a more generic direction.  It is now called Des Moines Functional Programming.

I’m happy that I have found others with similar interests and am hopeful that more will be able to make it out in the future.

Haskell Meetup

Haskell?

Yes, Haskell! ;)

Super simple Haskell

module Stuff where

f n :: Integer -> Integer
f n = n + 1

I’m attracted to technology of all sorts. Recently my interests have skewed towards Functional Programming and related programming languages. I get frustrated with the mundane day-to-day and look for drastically different things to help solve issues.

FP and static typing are two of those things.

I think that was the driver in the back of my head when I decided to learn Haskell. I’m not that social, generally, so I forced myself to seek out other people by announcing my intentions on Twitter.
It took over a week, but I was quite tickled to see how many other people showed interest. Not all have been able to show up, but there is a core group of about 6 others who have been able to make it consistently.

After the first 7 chapters, Haskell has been “weird”, “offputting”, and “interesting”. It has definitely a bit hard to learn. This was the most suprising part to me, I think, because I chose this book.

I’m committed to finishing this book, but I may also seek out some other resources afterwards (possibly during) to see how other people approach it.

I’m going to continue. Notes answers, and other code is available via the GitHub link below:

View on GitHub

Next Up

Since I started reading articles about Functional Programming, more and more Haskell articles show up in my feeds.  Since this is a language that has been on my list for a very long time, I decided now was a great time to try and learn it. 

The difference is that I put out some feelers for somebody else in my area who would want to learn with me.

I found a repo that I forked about how to start a study group.  So, I started reading and also posted a couple of places and created a meetup.

So far I only have one taker, but it's only been a few days. ;)

Not much to show

Since my last post, I have spent a fair amount of time getting familiar with Elixir.  I did a little work through The Daily Drip.  That didn't last long, though.  I didn't feel like I could work at it at a decent pace to justify the monthly cost.

Next I moved on to a book that I bought on a whim: The Ray Tracer Challenge.  This is a great book for learning about a new language.  I have two false starts under my belt.  (Both ended with bugs that I have yet to figure out).

That's OK with me because I did learn a lot about working with Elixir.  Since the early part of the year, life sort of got in the way and I lost my drive to try it again.  I dabbled with Elm a bit, can't quite get in the headspace to really give it a go.  Also, I'm waiting for the Elm book I'm reading to be more complete.

So, long story short, I have learned more Elixir (and a little Elm), but I don't have much to show for it.