Pat Eyler Interviews the Real World Haskell Team
December 24th, 2008 by Don Stewart
Yesterday, Pat Eyler of “On Ruby” published an interview with all three RWH authors, covering a broad range of issues relating to Haskell, functional programming, communities and technology adoption. The interview received a warm response online:
I like the focus on practicality. It makes Haskell’s wide adoption seem realistic.You can read the interview here.
In other news, we’re proud to announce that RWH is a finalist for the Jolt Awards. The Jolt Awards recognise software, technical books and other tech stuff that is ahead of the curve, or disruptive in some way, and is considered by some to be the Oscars of the our industry, so we’re happy to make the cut!
Also interesting is that two functional programming books as finalists (discussed on LtU). A seachange.
OK —- when everyone’s done with the praise, is there something to be done to help newbies trying to learn Haskell deal with the bugs in this book?
For example, I just started chapter 4 and carefully typed in the code for the InteractWith.hs. Following along, I ran the
ghc –make InteractWith
and got an error on line 15
But meanwhile, the book implies successful compilation of InteractWith and proceeds to to show how to run it.
Now, there is a comment in the code that suggests I replace “id” with “the name of our function below”. Apart from the fact that there is no function “below”, at least not in this section, it’s extremely misleading that the code as given is purported to compile and run when it doesn’t.
Newbies trying to figure out what’s going on are confused!
By the way, it’s clear a few pages later that you’re supposed to just use it as a template, always replacing “id” with something, but in that case, why demonstrate a successful compile of something that can’t in fact be compiled?
OK — turns out the real problem (which I didn’t figure out until trying some of the later examples) is that in the original example in the book, the line
myFunction = id
is indented and it shouldn’t be.
Given the relevance of indentation in this language, I blindly (newbie mode) followed the book format.
Sigh
Hopefully this stuff will be found by Google so the next schmuck won’t have to waste as much time as I did figuring it out.
David,
Please check out the Real World Haskell Book Club – http://groups.google.com/group/real-world-haskell-book-club
It’s designed to help people that have questions.
I should point out that all our example code is downloadable for free from the O’Reilly book site, so you shouldn’t have to be typing in anything.
That said, I tried copying-and-pasting that particular example from the final PDF, and it compiled fine.
Assuming you’re talking about the same page 72 that I’m looking at, the indentation is correct; it should line up with mainWith.