Some Abstract Talk

Most programmers from an imperative/object-oriented background go through this roller coaster when learning Haskell:

Stage One: Confusion

I don’t get it. Why doesn’t the class keyword instantiate an object? How do I declare a variable to be constant?

Stage Two: Fascination

I’ve never written more elegant code. It’s like… pure mathematics, so beautiful and concise. Java and Python are clumsy in comparison.

Stage Three: Frustration

What the hell is a Monad, and why should I care? How do I unwrap IO? Why is random number generation so damn obtuse?

Stage Four: Dismissal

Haskell? Yeah, it was an interesting research language. Great for quicksort and other CS103 algorithms, but for real world programming it’s obnoxious and restrictive.

Stage Five: Reawakening

I tried to code in Haskell again last night… it all makes sense now. This type system is incredible.

And then they’re part of the fold.

The problem is that most people seem to quit at stages one and four. Even after twenty years there aren’t many Haskell programmers. Do you guys think Haskell will ever manage to escape its poor-adoption limbo? Who or what do you think is holding the language back?

Functional Web: Functional Programing for Web Integration and Mashups

Functional programming is often perceived as being good for either doing mathematics or multi-core programming. As for its huge benefits for modern web architecture and development, they are not really known. This talk gives a few arguments about why functional programming matters for today’s and tomorrow’s web. Scala programming language is used in illustration examples, but concepts are applicable to other functional programming language.