Haskell

The Haskell logo. A combination of a lambda and bind.

Hello, and welcome to the Haskell computer programming course.

Contributing

All contributions are appreciated. Even newcomers are welcome to make changes, remember Be bold !

If you're a prospective student, don't be shy; Haskell has a reputation for being difficult but hopefully we can convince you that this is mostly undeserved. Additionally we hope to show you the wonders of functional programming and the intersection of mathematics and programming. Finally, please let us know if you have trouble learning or understanding anything in this course.

If you're a prospective contributor, feel free to any topic you feel comfortable with. There's quite a bit of work to be done here. Feel free to make large changes if you need to; the structure of certain parts of this course haven't been as meticulously designed as they should be yet and may need to be changed significantly.

Scope and Purpose

This course will have multiple uses based on how far and which sections are covered by the student. Various lesson plans will be laid out.

This course is likely going to be an advanced course but will start from the basics and hopefully should be completely usable by any motivated student, regardless of prior programming or mathematical knowledge (assumptions of knowledge will be documented so that links to other courses can be provided).

This course focuses on developing strong mathematical foundations and intuitions that aspiring Haskell programmers will find valuable both while using Haskell and possibly in other contexts as well.

Haskell is in an interesting place because it is both very interesting from an academic/research perspective but also a powerful tool for rapidly producing high quality code (in terms of speed, safety, and extensibility). This course will attempt to give a strong foundation for the more theoretical aspects of Haskell, but will also provide projects and problems to assist students in becoming comfortable and productive with Haskell as a tool for solving problems.

Lessons for Beginners

Introduction

Basic Haskell
Functions
Thinking with types
Higher-order functions
Recursion, folding, and map-reducing
Laziness
Typeclasses
Functors
Applicative
Monads
Syntactic sugar

Intermediate Lessons

Language extensions
Foldable and traversable
Monad transformers
Parsing
Dealing with text properly
Comonads
Profunctors
Basic lenses
QuickCheck and testing
Arrows

Advanced Lessons

Quantification
More lenses
Generalized abstract data types
Type families
Foreign function interface
Concurrency and parallelism
Optimization
Core
Plated

Class Projects

Ideally class projects can be designed in such a way that students can:

Do something novel
Do something interesting
Create it as they learn (build off of their previous work)
Show mastery of various topics and ability to use Haskell as a productive tool

A few ideas for this are:

Making an interpreter
Making an emulator
Making a compiler
Making a website
Making a text editor
Making a video game