Title: Talk: Why learn Haskell? (+ slides soon) slug: why-haskell-talk My dear friend and acquaintance Keegan McAllister is going to give a talk on Haskell in Boston's MIT CSAIL, geared towards the often-asked question: why learn it?. Here's a short abstract in his own words:
Why learn Haskell?
Tired of programming languages that just rehash old concepts with new syntax? Haskell is a truly unique language that will expand your mind and show you new ways to solve problems. We'll take a whirlwind tour of Haskell features, from simple to sophisticated, foundational to practical. We'll see how Haskell offers a better way to write software, be it pure computation or concurrent transactional network code. I won't get bogged down in details of syntax, or waving my hands about the ineffable beauty of functional programming. These are great topics to study on your own. This talk will give you some compelling, concrete reasons to do so.
Indeed, sounds exciting! This is meant for complete outsiders to the realm of Haskell and functional programming; apparently it should even be intelligible to complete newcomers to programming in general, so don't worry if you think you're not ready for that functional programming thing.
It's in similar vein to SPJ's talk A taste of Haskell (slides, video 1, video 2) from 2007; Haskell has progressed a lot since. Keegan's talk is much more terse and to the point; Simon's talk is long and a beautiful introduction if you have the time to invest (there's a lot of stuff there). Naturally, a complete — and very fun! — introduction to Haskell can be found at Learn You a Haskell (contents) which is also available in book form.
The event starts at 19:00 (7 PM for the lot of you) and is the BAHUG; it will also have a talk on version control from the viewpoint of functional programming languages after Keegan's. It will be happening this Thursday, September 29, 2011, in the MIT CSAIL Reading Room. If you are new to Haskell you are sure to find someone in the audience (or Keegan after the talk) to chat to and learn some basics. There will be free refreshments and apparently one of the sponsors is bringing FREE PIZZA!!! Sound good? Now if I were only on the same continent :)
The second instance of the talk will happen on Tuesday, the 11th of October 2011, again at MIT, in 2-143 (which decrypts to room 143 of building 2 at MIT). The post-talk chat is always involving and always different, so it's worth attending both.
Slides for Keegan's talk are now available!
If you decide to go, please post a reply to the mailing list or as a comment here to signal a rough idea of the head count; just showing up works too, of course.
Also check out Keegan's blog. It's got some fresh stuff for those interested in concurrent programming, some introductory stuff on Haskell, and non-Haskell-related Linux hacking (Keegan was a dev a ksplice so obligatorily he has a lot of experience with this sort of thing). I have found the post Typing mathematical characters in X very useful.