I'm going to make what should be an uncontroversial statement: if you don't understand and use monads, you are at best a quarter of a Haskell programmer. A corollary of this is that, since using monad transformers is the only (or at least the approved) way to use two or more monads together, if you don't understand and use monad transformers you ( Read more... )

totherme kindly drew my attention to this blog post today. The author, Slava Akhmechet, tries to explain away that horrible feeling of unproductivity and frustration that I know so well from my attempts to use Haskell: his claim is that it's just that my expectations are miscalibrated from using imperative languages. A Haskell solution to a given problem, ( Read more... )

This afternoon I gratefully took possession of the copy of Iverson's A Programming Language which the library had been holding for me. Within two sentences, he'd managed to say something so thought-provoking that I felt compelled to ( post about it here. )

After a thoroughly stressed-out weekend, I finally got the job application finished yesterday at 4pm. I was working on the basis that the recipients were four hours behind me :-) There's probably some vital bit of paper I'm missing - I'm worried about my transcript in particular, which didn't get sent off until last Thursday - but what the hell, it ( Read more... )

I'm in the middle of writing up a research proposal for a postdoc position I'm applying for. I've had enough of categorification for a while, and it struck me that doing formal semantics for a simple language in the APL family (J, K, A+, Matlab...) could be both Fun and Interesting. Some poking around on Google and MathSciNet suggests that nobody's ( Read more... )