ROSEdu Haskell workshop, first edition

Last month ROSEdu organized a set of workshops on various topics related to the field of computer science, at the Faculty of Automatics and Computer Science in UPB. I participated, along with Mihai Maruseac and Dan Șerban, as a trainer and speaker at the Haskell workshop, since, as you might have probably noticed from the Hakyll basis on which this blog rests, I'm very much in love with the language.

The Workshop lasted five days. Four of them were dedicated to specific subjects approached mostly from a practical point of view, with some incursions into theoretical concepts that couldn't be avoided. The last day consisted of a short hackathon, illustrating that someone with little to no knowledge about Haskell can in a short time come to contribute to a real-life application, be it a simple, fun game or a more complex project such as Yesod.

In the first day, Mihai discussed Haskell basics: some history, functions, lists, syntactic sugar, debugging and a full presentation on the importance of types and in particular static typing. A few other highlights are Dan's awesome talk on infinite lists and Mihai's presentations on GTK, diagrams and web. I approached two subjects: xmonad window management and static site generation using Hakyll.

Things went ok, generally speaking. Some of the students had already taken the functional programming class taught at the faculty, so now they had the occasion of getting a taste of the "real-world" Haskell and doing a bit more than implementing classical algorithms. Students with more experience in software development saw for example the advantages of the QuickCheck approach to software testing and the disadvantages of issues generated by Cabal's dependency system.

Since this was the first edition, there were also a lot of bad aspects. We had trouble doing a last-moment deployment of the virtual machine on the computers in the lab. Even so, a couple or three Yesod-related packages were missing, so the students had to experience dependency hell firsthand, which was anything but pleasant. These problems were only made worse by the fact that I wasn't speaking loudly enough¹.

As far as I could tell from my experience with the workshop, teaching Haskell "from N00b to Real World Programmer" is a real challenge in itself, and an achievable one I might add². The ordering of the subjects wasn't quite right and maybe some might need to be removed altogether. A more focused workshop might also do the trick; for example, I noticed that we haven't talked nearly enough about Haskell web technologies such as Fay, Happstack (as an alternative approach to Warp/Yesod) or threepenny.

That being said, I hope to see you there on the next edition!