Issue 7 2016-06-16

• The Story of Haskell at IMVU

  One weekend, Andy went home with the explicit goal of proving that Haskell was stupid and not good for writing production software. He came back on Monday glowing.

• Four months with Haskell

  I certainly wasn’t prepared for some of the areas where Haskell would blow me away, nor was I capable of realizing which parts would leave me hopelessly frustrated.

• Distributed Systems in Haskell

  As with many things Haskell, there’s a somewhat higher upfront cost, but it makes your life a lot easier as your programs scale up.

• Behavior-driven development (BDD) in Haskell with Hspec

  When programming the BDD way, you start writing the specs first. This is not only a good practice, it also helps to reason about your code as a series of individual decoupled units.

• Rapid: GHCi background threads, hot reloading and reload-surviving values

  You can use it for background services within a GHCi session that survive loading, reloading and unloading modules, which is particularly useful when writing long-running programs like servers and user interfaces.

• Why is the default catch-all not mandatory in a Haskell case statement?

  Haskell has a reputation for being a safe language. One that generally speaking pushes more of the possible programming errors to compile-time errors.

• Does Haskell have “variables”? Or, easiest way to read configuration data?

  Haskell has immutable values, which is understood and appreciated. Does it even have immutable variable binding?