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I have to make a presentation about Haskell, and I'm looking for interesting Haskell examples, tips, and topics in general I should not miss in my presentation.

The purpose of the presentation is to give a general idea about the language.

I'm still writing what I'll say, but the following topics are already included:

  • Lazy evaluation
  • Ways of defining functions (pattern matching, lambda expressions, etc)
  • Higher order functions and currying

What do you think that must be explained when doing a talk about Haskell?

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Hope you upload and share the presentation after done. – Gulshan Apr 29 '11 at 4:56
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What is the audience? – LennyProgrammers Apr 29 '11 at 6:29
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@Lenny222 I'm studying Computer Science in 3rd year of the career, and the audience will be the students of my classrom. – Oscar Mederos Apr 29 '11 at 6:40
I would stress pure-functionality. Back then i was amazed, that you can guess by the declaration of e.g. "fst :: (a, b) -> a" what the function can only do. I also find code a lot easier to read, when i don't have to pay attention to variable reassignments. – LennyProgrammers Apr 29 '11 at 8:02
@Lenny222 You should write this as an answer. – Oscar Mederos Apr 29 '11 at 8:13
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5 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

I would stress pure-functionality. Back then i was pretty amazed to learn, that you can guess by the declaration of e.g. "fst :: (a, b) -> a" what the function can only do.

I also find code a lot easier to read, when i don't have to pay attention to variable reassignments.

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up vote 4 down vote
  • Monads
  • Point free style
  • List comprehension (bonus points for relating back to monads)

Edit: making this CW FOR JUSTICE.

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@Rein Yes, that's something I have in mind too, but still need to learn about Monads. – Oscar Mederos Apr 29 '11 at 4:51
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Teaching something is the best way to learn it. – Rein Henrichs Apr 29 '11 at 4:53
+1 for Point free style (I'd also give a +1 for the other two, but alas, I cannot) – alternative Apr 29 '11 at 10:49
I don't think there will be time to get to monads, unless this is a fairly sophisticated audience. – Eric Wilson Apr 29 '11 at 13:47
I doubt there'll be much time to get to the pointless style either unless you have a pretty sophisticated audience. – JUST MY correct OPINION Apr 30 '11 at 13:56
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up vote 3 down vote

I would talk about the type system

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Heh. Duh. *facepalm* Assumptions make an "ass" out of "u" and "mptions". – Rein Henrichs Apr 29 '11 at 6:11
up vote 1 down vote

I always show off some elegant Haskell snippets when I'm preaching Haskell to friends and colleagues. Two-line quicksort and the ~22-character code generating the endless list of primes are two of my favorites.

I would also say something about concurrency, as this is increasingly important, and is also a key factor in making functional languages more and more popular. You could briefly mention that since Haskell is purely functional it is (mostly) stateless - which means that it doesn't require locking. You could also go a little deeper and say something about software transactional memory (STM) in Haskell.

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Interesting. Didn't know about the primes generator. I'm seeing it now... definitely I'll include that! I already had Quicksort ;) – Oscar Mederos Apr 29 '11 at 8:02
by the way, do you have a link to the prime generator that is approx. 22 characters? – Oscar Mederos Apr 29 '11 at 8:13
@OscarMederos Code: nubBy(((>1) .) . gcd) [2..] Link: gimbo.org.uk/blog/2007/04/28/primes-one-liner-in-haskell Note that you have to import List. – Lstor Apr 29 '11 at 9:39
up vote 0 down vote

Haskell as a language for difficult problems (for the reasons in "haskell's niche: hard problems": the type system supporting fundamental changes; domain specific languages; and naming concepts), but most of all, imho, because the abstractions are close to the mathematical ones. With OO I always have the need "to play computer" at some level to fully understand; with Haskell I can rely much more on pure reasoning.

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