The audience laughs appreciatively as Mark Fine talks about the standard books used by new Haskellers: LYAH, Real World Haskell, etc. Oftentimes these books contain code that no longer compiles, or reference obsolete libraries. Mark suggests another way to learn: pick small but real projects, and iterate on them.

In this video he shares tricks to keep the compiler happy and to get yourself unstuck while developing Haskell projects.

Summary

• It’s difficult getting your first real thing done in Haskell
• Some background about Mark’s involvement at Swift Navigation
• Things you have probably already tried
  • The big stack o’ Haskell books only gets you so far
  • Github code search for examples
  • Stack Overflow
  • Hoogle
• Approaches to working and learning incrementally
  • Coding “wishfully” is a powerful way to learn Haskell
  • Growing programs forward from inputs as well as backwards from outputs
  • Make minimum viable changes to keep compiler happy
  • Compile early often and always!
  • One great tool is punting on a function definition with undefined
• Real example of working iteratively
  • mfine/nfl-divisions-power-rankings
  • It’s a project in twelve steps
  • Tries to answer which NFL teams are best
  • Notice this project is a problem that Mark enjoys, hence easier to stick with

Related Posts

• Pragmatic Haskell for Beginners, Lecture 2
• Pragmatic Haskell for Beginners, Lecture 1
• Creating a package on Hackage