Arnaud Bailly
Thanks Yves for your advice. And I agree with you that too much laziness may be mind-blowing for most of the audience, yet this is one of the characteristics of Haskell, whether or not we like it and whatever troubles it can induce.
I really think the knapsack is simple, not too far away from real world and might be demonstrated with live code in 5 minutes. I will have a look anyway at more "spectacular" stuff like gloss or yesod but I fear this is out of scope.
Gloss is definitely not out of scope. It is to simple 2D graphics what Yesod is to web applications. I write two-minutes visualizations using it all the time. Of course if you want to show something great, you shouldn't fear learning it first. Also showing the language features, despite their greatness, makes people go like: "Ok, that's great, but I can do it in my language using <insert control construct here>". If you really don't want to go for something amazing like Diagrams, Gloss or Yesod, I really suggest at least bringing the run-time system into the game. Show concurrency, STM and parallel evaluation. Show how you can write a full-featured finger server in five minutes that is fast, secure and amazingly readable. Something like that. Math problems amaze Haskellers, not programmers in general. Show how Haskell solves practical problems, for which there is no simple solution in more common languages. Don't show why Haskell is also good. Show why Haskell is /a lot better/. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/