A video/slideshow hybrid about the fixed point combinator

Dear Haskellers,

thanks a lot for all your comments on my previous video! One comment in particular got me:

No offense but that was really slow-moving. It should not have been a video, it should have been a PDF presentation which I could have ripped through in a fraction of the runtime of the video.

Very honest and true. The big drawback of video as a medium is that the recipient is at the mercy of the speaker’s pace. In fact, I probably wouldn’t even watch my own video as it would feel too slow for me…

… No more! I hereby present a video/slideshow hybrid that explains the fixed point combinator in Haskell. It’s a series of slides you can rip through at your heart’s content, but when you press the “play” button, the corresponding narration will play as a video!

The Fixed Point Combinator - video/slideshow hybrid. You need a modern browser that supports HTML 5 and the <video> tag to view this.

tag to view this. alternatively, download the movie-only version on archive.org

I have written a custom player in HTML 5 and JavaScript since current video formats don’t support this use case; the closest feature that I’ve come across is a “chapter track”, but that would still miss the written notes and you’d still have to wait to the video to fully load before being able to access the slides. (Keep in mind that you still have to wait for the video to load if you want to start the narration in the middle of the presentation…)

And as before, I want your comments. :-) Tell me about

Format of the presentation - Did you watch the video or did you zip through the slides?

Technical realization, useability - Does the video player actually work? Any interface gotchas?

Haskell content - Comprehensible? Mistakes I made?

Effectiveness - To test whether you actually learned something, I have a homework question for you :-P. The task is: Use the fixed point combinator to calculate fibonacci numbers.

Flattr

Oh, and if you really like what I did here, you can now make a microdonation. Like Luke Palmer and Conal Elliott of Haskell fame, I have signed up with Flattr. So, if you like it, flattr me by clicking my Flattr button at the top of the page.