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



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