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On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 02:16:47AM -0700, Clifford Beshers wrote:
Interesting. I just gave a talk to the SGVLUG (San Gabriel Valley Linux
Users Group, which is centered at Cal Tech). It was the first time I've
given such a talk, half about Linspire/Freespire, half about Haskell
features, and the other three halves were technical problems.
Oh, I live a block from Caltech, I didn't know there was a Haskell talk
there.
Dang! I referenced your 'small but featureful grep' as an example of
how Haskell should help reduce the need for `little languages' and
two-level languages. I promised to come back in six months or so and
talk about the progress we've made on development tools for Freespire.
I'll let you know.
Writing the slides, I found that it is hard to disentangle all the
concepts and build from the ground up. Those of us who use it have
forgotten just how many new concepts there are and how tightly bound
together they are in Haskell. As always, when you try to teach
something you get a deeper understanding of it. I'll see if I can't
clean up some of the examples with hindsight and send it along to you
and see what you think.
I always prefered using a chalkboard (or whiteboard, or overhead +
markers) instead of a pre-prepared slideshow when giving talks. it lets
me change the focus depending on audience reaction and questions more.
If you can get away with it, I'd recommend it for future talks, ignore
anyone that says it is not profesional, they wouldn't have paid
attention anyway to anything other than your font choices and choice of
screen-wipes between slides.
If I had been doing a tutorial, I might have done that, but I was doing
a whirlwind tour where the goal was to get people excited. Also, I find
that the first time presenting some information, I do better if I lay
it out before hand. Explanation of code is a different beast than
creation of it.