Haskell for everyone: lightning intro and hands-on coding workshop

Curious about the Haskell language, why it exists anyway, what its goals are, and how it might be useful to you?

Forget the abstract mathematical gobbledygook out there on Haskell! I believe in learning by doing, by seeing, by trying, starting with the concrete.

Come to the first meeting of the new Pittsburgh Haskell (http://PittsburghHaskell.org/), where we are going to start on a really fun journey!

The format of the first meeting:

• short introductions by everyone

• 10-minute lightning talk by Franklin: the goals of the new meetup, the rationale behind the invention of Haskell in the 1990s

• workshop: learn iteratively through hands-on coding

For best results, come with your laptop already having Haskell installed. Here are my detailed instructions on a good installation (https://github.com/pittsburgh-haskell/haskell-installation), since the official documentation is imperfect right now.

Be prepared to write, run, and debug code. You can do this alone or find someone to pair with. A link to starter code is here for Git cloning (https://github.com/pittsburgh-haskell/haskell-intro-session).

Even if you have never seen Haskell in your life before, before you walk out the door this evening, you should expect to have done the following as a sampler on getting started with Haskell:

• worked within the fast and fun GHCi REPL/interpreter

• written your own HSpec (https://hspec.github.io/) unit test, run it, seen it fail, fixed it, seen it succeed

• written your own QuickCheck property-based (generative) test, made it work

• used Haskell as a no-compile scripting (http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/runghc.html) language, writing and running an interactive terminal-based program

• used the Cabal (http://www.haskell.org/cabal/) packaging system to do things such as: use the GHC optimizing native compiler (http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/options-optimise.html) to generate a standalone binary to run, run tests automatically, package your app as though ready to upload to the Haskell community central archive, Hackage (http://hackage.haskell.org/).

If you use Twitter, follow @PghHaskell (http://twitter.com/pghhaskell) for useful information.