Software Engineering discussion

I bailed out early. I have had a love/hate relationship with this book over the last three months. For Haskell concepts I already understood, this book deepened that understanding. For concepts that were knew to me, it was difficult to learn them from this book. The biggest reason for this is the lack of programming exercises. In my opinion, there is no way someone can learn a new language without struggling with trying to program in it.

Tonight, a friend reminded me of Project Euler at http://projecteuler.net . I think that it would be very helpful to try and solve these problems with Haskell.

Also, I recently found Typeclassopedia at http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Ty... . This looks like a great way to get over the hump with the concepts in the latter part of the book, such as functors, applicative functors, and monoids.

While this is probably the best general purpose Haskell book that I have seen, I think that it focuses too much on the trees and not enough on the forest, and tries to teach a new language to programming couch potatoes, who critically need exercise to get lasting neuronal change.

2/5 Stars.

I’m glad the reading of this book is over. Unfortunately I couldn’t commit to reading this book and actually trying to understand and use all covered material and language features. Some chapters’ reorganization would help. But I think the best time for reading such a book would be a summer season just because more time would be available for practicing, but I guess that’s just for me.

I liked a level of details provided in this book and a high number of examples, though I agree that without doing any exercises it is hard to say if this book would be helpful for doing actual programming and solving problems. I think in Questions and Answers on the book’s web-site, author actually promises to provide some programming exercises in future.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard about Project Euler, but it looks interesting.

Here is a sample Project Euler problem (#1, in fact):

Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5.

Here is my solution in Haskell:

sum $ union [ x | x <- [3,6..999 ] ] [ x | x <- [5,10..999 ] ]

Only 378 more to go :)

I honestly think that something like this single line solution written in Haskell looks very cool and elegant. Project Euler would be a great 90 days summer challenge, unless we'd be reading something like Programming Language Pragmatics (Third Edition)!

I think that this is a great idea. After we finish "Coders at Work" in June, let's declare the 3Q12 selection "Project Euler Challenge," where each participant can go through as many problems as they can in those three months, in their language of choice. My choice is Haskell.

Sounds good! I will take this opportunity to learn ARM assembly.