Simon Peyton-Jones, Microsoft



Track: Programming

Date: Monday, July 23

Time: 1:30pm - 5:00pm

Location: D136

Haskell is the world's leading purely functional programming language that offers a radical and elegant attack on the whole business of writing programs. In the last two or three years there has been an explosion of interest in Haskell, and it is now being used for a bewildering variety of applications.

In this tutorial, I will try to show you why programming in Haskell is such fun, and how it makes you think about programming in a new way.

I'm going to use xmonad (http://xmonad.org) as my running example; it's an X11 window manager written entirely in 500 lines of Haskell. Based on xmonad I will show you how to

write functional programs

test them using QuickCheck

write imperative programs

call foreign functions

use Haskell for scripting applications

I won't assume you know any functional programming at all, but I will assume that you are an experienced professional programmer, so I will move along quite briskly.