Haskell - Pure and simple

Haskell - Pure and simple - Ben Kolera

There is a tendency for some people to make assumptions and write Haskell off due to the fact that it is too academic, that you can't do anything 'real world' with pure functional programming or that you need a degree in category theory just to understand any of the code.

This talk will help convince you that all of that these assumptions are unfounded, through a shallow dive of some code that I've been writing to implement the PubSubHubbub specification inside of Haskell. You wont learn the ins and outs of the Haskell technologies used, but you should walk away from them unafraid of trying them out and full of ideas of how you could use them yourselves.

Topics covered will be:

• The basics of cabal and setting up a project.

• Enough Haskell syntax to be able to understand the code.

• Producing a HTTP API via Scotty

• Consuming HTTP APIs via http-conduit

• Persisting application state to disk using AcidState

• Simple in memory message queuing via STM TQueues.

• Testing all of the above with Tasty + Hunit

For the curious, the code is here:
https://github.com/benkolera/haskell-hubbub