Chris Done

I really like the new design. The old site was certainly showing its age--very dense and hard to navigate. Never mind the lovely 1990s motif. This is far more welcoming and user-friendly, especially to those who might be curious about Haskell.

It's exciting to witness Haskell gain traction within industry. Facebook announced last week that its building an entirely new Haskell team to focus on distributed systems, data mining, and machine learning. They're also hiring for a second team to support Haxl [1].

For those eager to use Haskell in the workplace, I imagine the new design should make it easier to formulate a compelling business case. Being able to point your project manager and/or colleagues to a website that clearly explains what Haskell is--and what sets it apart--is a big plus.

The source code for the site can be found on GitHub [2]. Awesome work by Chris Done, who kicked this off last year; see his blog post about the motivation for the new site [3].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2useoq/haskell_opportunities_at_facebook/

[2] https://github.com/haskell-infra/hl

[3] http://chrisdone.com/posts/haskell-lang

Dijkstra had a lot of influence for some years on the UTCS undergraduate program, whose first undergraduate course for much of the 1990s was taught in Haskell and was a brutal weed out, at ~70% attrition for the first year courses.

However, by 2001, the failure rate was so high that the department moved to Java, much to Dijkstra's chagrin: https://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java/

The UTCS undergrad program has been "nerfed" twice since the 1990s - in 2001 and in in 2014. Various political interests during the first tech bubble - to produce more graduates - and later, to have more under-represented minorities, have dramatically reduced what Dijkstra pushed for.

There’s Inflex [0], which has a very interesting (and I think better) approach to spreadsheets. I’ve also been working independently on a very similar idea [1], though it’s early days yet and I’m still busy figuring out the how to build it in a principled way. The Inflex website also has a really nice bibliography [2] with a fairly complete catalogue of what else has been done in this space.

[0] https://chrisdone.com/posts/inflex/

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/nexo

[2] https://chrisdone.com/posts/inflex-bibliography/

Nah, like any bad analogy, it can be stretched :) Once you've moved past the "lies-to-children[1]" version, you can ascend to the real meat of the burrito: https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html

And once you've fully grokked burritos in terms of monads, you can finally reach that zen level where you solve your problems without even a single line of code (because you've started working at the burrito shop instead: http://chrisdone.com/posts/monads-are-burritos ).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

If I am not mistaken, Dijkstra advocated for Haskell to be used as a language of instruction at universities. There is an essay somewhere online about it. What I could find is this: [1].

Edit: Indeed, the PDF that is linked to in [1] looks like a scan of the original. [2]

[1] https://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java/

[2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/OtherDocs/To%20the%20Budget%20Council%20concerning%20Haskell.pdf