programming musings

I finally found time to watch Simon Peyton-Jones’ recent OSCON 2007 tutorial, A Taste of Haskell (split in Part I and II, around 90 minutes each). From the many comments around and a quick look at the slides, I knew it was a basic intro for non-functional programmers and kept wondering if it would be worth the time. From this you can easily infer that either i am a moron or hadn’t seen a talk of Simon’s before. Not that it discards totally the first option, but actually i hadn’t! As it comes out, Simon is a delight to hear and see in action. He’s full of energy and enthusiasm and knows how to transmit his passion for what he does. In this regard, this talk reminds me of Abelson and Sussman’s SICP videos. These guys are not your ivory-tower academic type. They have such a great time doing what they do that they cannot help showing it off. Perhaps it’s because they got their hands dirty implementing the systems they theorize about. At any rate, Simon’s tutorial is absolutely worth watching. If you’re new to Haskell and functional programming, you belong to the perfect audience for this crash course. It is also remarkable that the attendees were quite participative and made lots of questions that made the lecture quite lively. That and Simon’s refreshing sense of humour, which makes these videos great fun even for those of you knowing everything about monads. Enjoy!

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