haskell-intro

Initially we wanted to learn ‘just some functional concepts’, but Haskell proved very immersive and engaging.

Tutor:

Y: @yuras

Student background:

Write something abnout what you do and your interests, perhaps add few links - it helps our tutor to prepare:

• EP: interested in reproducible economic research, eg data science projects as a data pipeline. Maintainer of mini-kep macroeconomic time series dataset, course author on machine readable financial statements analysis. No formal computer science background, but fair math and econometrics. some reputation on Stack Overflow for python

• Zarak: studied neuroscience at college, along with coursework in applied math and physics. Hoping to study a bit of category theory via Chapter 0 by Aluffi next summer.

• Category theory Youtube playlist - Zarak

Learning objective:

Introduction to new approaches in programming using Haskell

Comment: we are likely to continue use python/julia/R for development, but introduction to
Haskell can be thought provoking for us - the result is a little change we think of developing code.

Questions:

• we know some functional tools in python, eg lambdas, list comprehension, iterators, filter, map (can apply), itertools (mostly heard of). how far haskell extends these? (probably a silly question)

• Haskell type system motivation (what is being achived) and implementation

• pandoc seems the most famous popular application written in Haskell. Any story behind it? Was Haskell particularly well suited for file format transformations or chosen accidentally for it?

• very short overview of Haskell in production - what is Haskell community doing?

• haslkell seems strognly typed, does this make it a fast?

• How is Haskell related to some other functional programming languages? Why use Haskell over, e.g. SML, Erlang?