[darcs-devel] Haskell novice

David Roundy droundy at abridgegame.org
Sun Jun 12 05:48:01 PDT 2005


On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 04:27:39PM +0200, yin wrote:
> Hello, I'm Matej 'yin' Gagyi (from Slovakia).

Hello!

> I'm new to Haskell and I need some _good_ tutorial for the language.
> There is no such document on Haskell homepage!

I'm not sure what your requirements are, but I started learning haskell
with the "gentle" introduction

http://haskell.org/tutorial/

and the others available on the Haskell homepage.  I guess it may not be
gentle enough, depending on how much programming experience you've got.

You can ignore the sections on list comprehensions and arrays, which I
never use, and find a bit confusing.  The key is to get started producing
code.  Write a program to capitalize all the words in a text file (or read
from standard input) or something like that.  The Haskell language is
mostly quite simple.  The complicated part is usually understanding the
standard libraries, but you don't need to do that in order to code in
haskell, you can just write everything yourself.

I'd also recommend joining the haskell-cafe mailing list.  It's a very
friendly environment with lot's of people willing to answer newbie
questions.  There are usually many ways to solve the same problem, and you
can learn a lot by posting a bit of your code and asking how it could be
done better.  Or if you've got a bug, post your code and say what you think
it should do, and ask why it doesn't.

> I would like to join the Darcs developement... first I need to teach the
> language to myself... second understand Darcs code (where to start in
> the source?)

I'd start by avoiding any module with "Patch" in its name.  Those tend to
be the complicated ones.  Darcs commands each have their own module (except
Unpull and Unrecord, which are in the same module), so an easy way to get
familiar with the code would be to modify an existing command.

You can browse the "confirmed wishlist" items in the bug tracking system
(there's a link on the wiki), and pick what looks like a simple one.  Then
you could ask here for advice as to how to make that change.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net




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