Don Stewart
andrewcoppin:
Edward Kmett wrote:
"Knowledge of Haskell" means very different things to different people. I'd be somewhat leery of blindly hiring someone based on their ability to answer a couple of pop Haskell quiz questions.
A better test might be if they really understood Applicative and Traversable, or if they knew how to use hsc2hs; Talk about unboxing and when to apply strictness annotations, finger trees, stream fusion, purely functional data structures or ways to implement memoization in a purely functional setting, or how to abuse side effects to do so in a less pure way. Those are the kinds of things you get exposed to through actually using Haskell, rather than through reading a monad tutorial.
Hmm, interesting. Applicative and Traversable are two classes I've never used and don't really understand the purpose of. I have no idea what hsc2hs is. I keep hearing finger trees mentioned, but only in connection to papers that I can't access. So I guess that means that I don't count as a "knowledgable" Haskell programmer. :-(
RWH is free and online, and covers many useful things. There's no excuse :-)
Knowing about something /= knowing how to use it. I own and have read RWH, but I've never had to use hsc2hs, or Applicative, etc. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com