gmane.comp.lang.haskell.wikibook

One less red link in Haskell Basics

Daniel Mlot — 2012-04-10T02:41:31

Hello,

Since I am doing some moderately large scale changes to the Beginner's 
Track so that we can eventually dispense with that "in reorganization" 
warning on the main page, I guess it is a good idea to write regularly 
to the list so that anyone with an opinion can chime in.

Last week some nice progress (IMHO) was done with the first two parts of 
the Beginner's Trail; and by now I believe a newbie wouldn't find any 
serious breakage disrupting his progress through them. Beyond switching 
the main focus of "Next steps" to a first presentation of pattern 
matching, the other major change was an attempt at writing one of the 
two new pages that Apfelmus, back in 2010 envisioned for Haskell Basics; 
namely, "Building a vocabulary".

My realization of "Building a vocabulary" has the same goal Apfelmus 
originally outlined - making newbies aware of the existence and 
importance of Prelude and the hierarchical libraries. Unfortunately, it 
does so in a chatty rather than practical way. To counter that, we will 
need at least some of the following:

1. the Prelude cheat sheets we talked about in 2010 (see 
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Experimental_Modules/Cheat_sheet_prototype_1 
for a rough demo - though by now I believe that the text sections after 
the table are unnecessary);

2. to make better use of the "Libraries Reference" part of Haskell in 
Practice (by completing some pages, making others clearer and providing 
more references to them in the Beginner's Track);

3. more exercises which involve actually using Prelude and the libraries.

Some of these suggestions could be incorporated into "Building a 
vocabulary"; others would fit better being diluted along the Beginner's 
Trail. For the moment, though, I believe the initial version of the new 
page can give newbies some useful pointers.

As usual, it will be most appreciated if you have a few minutes to spend 
reading "Building a vocabulary" and share your opinions on whether the 
advice given is sound, the text is not too boring and the example I made 
up is not too ridiculous.

Regards,

Daniel Mlot

Truth values and a couple other things

Daniel Mlot — 2010-05-29T08:09:44

While trying to think about how I could tackle the section on numerical 
types in "Type basics" I found out that I couldn't reason properly about 
it without knowing to which extent types would be discussed in the 
previous sections. That led me to "jump the gun" and attempt writing the 
bulk of the section myself. Apfelmus, please forgive me if that bothers 
you in any way (for instance, if you had a draft of your own being 
prepared) - in any case, just as I took some liberties with your outline 
feel free to do the same and turn my text upside down if you feel the 
need to :)

I will use this message to register some issues that are roaming in my 
mind lest I forget to mention them:

* Since we are reorganizing and rewriting most of the first chapters 
anyway it could be a good opportunity to standardize the style of code 
blocks. One option would be just using <source> tags everywhere to get 
syntax highlighting (with recent changes to the Wikibooks CSS files 
<source> is also bundled with the standard grey background box). There 
would be a couple possible issues to consider, though. We would probably 
have to do some template engineering, although I don't think that would 
be too troublesome. Another source of annoyance would be that GHCi 
printouts, ubiquitous on the early chapters, wouldn't be subject to the 
same standardization. Finally, there is the didactic concern of whether 
highlighting can be distracting for complete newbies during the first 
few modules (I do not have a really strong position on the subject but 
feel that "plain" plain text does have some charm due to sheer 
simplicity and transparency).

* One thing that occurred to me while writing about guards: is it even 
accurate to speak of our if/else and related constructs as "control 
structures"? Even if it is correct, is there any better term to use - 
one that does not have such imperative undertones?

Regards,
Daniel Mlot

"List of topics" meta-module

Daniel Mlot — 2010-05-12T00:25:33

As a product of the discussions we (mainly me and Apfelmus) had over the 
last few threads I created a "List of topics" page in 
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/List_of_topics . It is a simple 
presentation of the key topics covered by the book modules with 
occasional comments. The intention is to make picturing the structure of 
the book and brainstorming about large-scale reorganizations easier. As 
of now it covers only "Haskell Basics", "Elementary Haskell" and 
"Intermediate Haskell". If you find the list useful feel free to discuss 
book structure in its talk page, expand it to cover the advanced 
chapters or make test edits to visualize the effects of changes to the 
book organization.

Regards,

Daniel Mlot

Splitting of "More on Datatypes"

Daniel Mlot — 2010-05-09T19:05:32

Hi all,

One of the ideas I had while reading the book but didn't have the guts 
to pull off without asking for feedback was splitting the More on 
Datatypes module in Intermediate Haskell. As of now, it has a first part 
which describes an assortment of important datatype techniques 
(enumerations, records and a more formal presentation of parametrized 
types - using Maybe as example) and then moves on to a long discussion 
of binary trees and how to define maps and folds for arbitrary data 
structures. The coupling of these two parts is very loose (the only 
concept of the first part needed for the data structure discussions is 
parametrization) and probably does not justify them being glued together 
to make such a long (27k) module. Another related issue is that one 
important omission from the Beginner's Track is an explanation of 
newtype, and I guess More on Datatypes would be the right place to put 
it. That would make the module even longer, however, and would be 
another reason to make the split.

The only thing I am not sure of is a good name for the second "half" of 
More on Datatypes in case of a split. The obvious choice would be "Trees 
and ???" (I have no idea of a good concise term to replace the ???), 
although maybe something more generic like "Introduction to Data 
Structures" could work.

Thanks, and see you,

Daniel Mlot

P.S.: By the way, Apfelmus has moved Type Declarations to just before 
Pattern Matching. Probably the right thing to do (it just didn't fit 
very well in Haskell Basics), but it will also require some reworking of 
Type Declarations (when I made that module more verbose I envisioned it 
as a preparation for a more general Pattern Matching discussion several 
modules ahead, but with the rearranging the redundancies are probably 
too obvious). I will give it a try soon.

Anyone around?

Daniel David — 2010-05-06T21:50:06

Hello everybody,

I joined this list after spending a good while learning Haskell basics with the Wikibook and at the same time trying to do some refactoring on the book itself. Consider this a test message: I am looking for other people interested in discussing ways to improve the contents, and I'm polling the reactions/activity of the subscribers of this list. I am particularly interested in the Beginner Modules - not only because it's the area I, as a newbie haskeller, feel more comfortable in contributing to right now, but also because it naturally would tend to be kind of overlooked by veterans willing to add interesting stuff in the advanced chapters (as far as I can be aware of, only one Wikibook regular has seen some of my contributions there so far, namely Apfelmus).

Waiting for your replies ;-)

Daniel Mlot

P.S.: Forgive me for any etiquette mistakes, it is the first time I'm using a conventional mailing list as opposed to a phpBB forum or something in that vein.