Monads and Stockor

Haskell and its Monads By: Ian Graves

Haskell is a purely functional, lazy, generally immutable, and statically-typed programming language that has been popular in academic programming language circles for almost two decades. More recently it has been gaining popularity and use in the mainstream. Popular libraries in frameworks include the Yesod and Snap web frameworks, the Iteratee, Conduit, and Pipes I/O libraries, and a plethora of language processing tools including libraries like Parsec parser combinator library to name a few. Being a pure language, Haskell comes out of the box with no side-effects (ex. variable assignment). So how does anybody get anything done?

One approach to doing this is by using the monad. You may have heard of using monads in Javascript from this talk ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkZFtimgAcM ).

Monads are a structure borrowed from a branch of mathematics called Category Theory, but you don't need to know anything about category theory to use them in Haskell (or Javascript for that matter). This talk will cover a basic introduction to Haskell and then jump into a crash course into monads and their applications in Haskell and maybe in your programming language of choice.

About Ian:

Ian Graves is a PhD student in the Center for High Assurance Computing at the University of Missouri. His research focus centers around languages and security implications therein. Haskell is his jam, but Ruby's okay too. Read more about Ian at his site: http://grav.es/

Stockor - A newly open source Rails ERP system By: Nathan Stitt

Nathan has developed Stockor, a ERP (Enterprise Resouce Planning) system. It track business inventory and sales and purchase orders. It’s a fair size Rails app with around 100 database tables and about 50 API end-points. As part of the process of open sourcing it, he’s spitting it into standalone Ruby Gems and Rails Engines. He’ll discuss some of the techniques he’s used to keep the code organized and to auto-generate the API methods.

About Nathan:

Nathan is a freelance Ruby and web front-end developer who’s been writing web apps since the late 90’s. He’s been developing Stockor in between freelance gigs for the last few years. Read more at http://nathan.stitt.org and http://argosity.com/ .