OSCON 2007 - Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell Part I

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.

From the O'Reilly Media Open Source Convention, July 23, 2007. Video provided by Galois. Slides are available here.

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bogdotro said: 2 years ago

this guy is really strenuous. From the first minute I had an headake.... oh my god he should'n present anything... not even tv weather....

wildgift said: 2 years ago

The videographer needs to leave the camera focused on the screen instead of the presenter. Once he starts talking about the code, I need to be able to read the code to understand what's going on. Don't waste time trying to keep up with the presenter - stick with the presentation.

Paraselene said: 1 year ago

Excellent lecture, imho - Simon manages to bubble contagious enthusiasm for his 'baby', whilst at the same time given a pretty respectable overview of Haskell's unique and familiar features - all with a smattering of dry wit, where appropriate.

As far as the 'videography' comment above is concerned, the slides are available in pdf format here: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/os2007/os_peytonjones.pdf (which is a far better solution than the cameraman maintaining focus on the slides).

yolninyo said: 158 days ago

Oreilly! Seriously! Can't your "media empire" hire a competent videographer? How hard is it for you people to understand as to WHAT exactly is important in a stupid talk? If you need some pointers on how to create an appropriate instructional video, just look at one of the hundreds posted by grade schoolers! Many of them a hundred times better than this garbage posted here where we don't get to see what the hell he's talking about but just keep looking at the guy pointing to the board saying stuff like... "now I add this to this and then call this function on it... and if you look on the right side of the expression, you'd understand immediately why i did that" except that I can't really LOOK AT THE FRIKKIN EXPRESSION BECAUSE THE CAMERAMAN HAD AN IDIOTIC FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN... ffs!!!!!

DuckFm said: 123 days ago

Good lecture, i like the way he speak about Haskell

coloringful said: 118 days ago

nice lecture, nice video

oldtimerock said: 93 days ago

yeah i agree kool lecture

genericlevitra said: 57 days ago

nice video, thanks!