We are happy to announce the beta of the FP Complete School of
Haskell. Our goal is to remove the biggest obstacle to learning the
language.
All you procrastinators promising yourselves to take up Haskell
one day -- you have no excuses left! Go to our beta signup page and
get a chance to experience Haskell the way it was intended to be.
You can also watch a video walk-through of the School of Haskell on
that page.
What is School of Haskell?
School of Haskell is mainly about learning Haskell. In
this world of instant gratification, to ask a potential student to
find a book (even if it's an online book), install the compiler,
fiddle with the editor, go through the
edit/save/load/compile/fix-errors/eventually-run cycle is just too
much to ask. This is the 21st century! Granted, we are
still far away from The
Diamond Age, and the School of Haskell is not "A Young Lady's
Illustrated Primer," but we are getting there.
The first thing you notice when you browse through the School of
Haskell is a number of tutorials, some of them bundled into
courses. At this moment the list is very incomplete, but it's
enough to get you started. More content will be appearing on a
regular basis.
When you open a tutorial, it looks pretty much like a
programmer's blog -- until you notice that some of the embedded
code fragments are alive. You can compile and run them
with one press of a button.
Some of the snippets are interactive: you are prompted for input
and the result is evaluated and displayed. Others create mini web
sites with all the richness of HTML 5.
But the real fun begins when you discover that you can
edit these fragments in place. There are exercises at the
end of each tutorial that you can solve right there on the spot.
You can play with the snippets that generate web pages and watch
the effects. You can't get more immediate than that.
Can I create my own content?
Our initial goal was to just publish a few active tutorials, but
it quickly became obvious that, if we wanted more content, we'd
have to involve the community at large. But to make content
creation attractive we had to provide tools. So we implemented an
online markup editor and threw in a live preview window. One thing
led to another and we ended up with a whole system that lets every
user develop their own content and share it with the public. So now
we have a little publishing system, which should be very
attractive to Haskell programmers.
How cool is it to be able to write a post with embedded runnable
and editable Haskell programs? We have already seen very
enthusiastic response from our alpha users who immediately started
producing amazing content. Some of them decided to move their blogs
to the new medium that the School of Haskell offers.
But you don't have to be an experienced Haskell programmer to
take advantage or our content creation system. It so happens that
the content editor can be easily used as an interactive scratchpad
where you can create, compile, and run small Haskell programs. Just
surround your code with markdown fences, as in:
``` active haskell
main = putStrLn "Hello Monadic World!"
```
and try running it in the preview pane. We have a full blown
Haskell IDE in the works, but this simple scratchpad functionality
can liberate many a Haskell newcomer from the drudge of installing
the compiler and libraries on their machines.
There is a fairly substantial set of libraries at your disposal
when developing contents. They come from the Stackage project. We provide complete Haddock documentation and Hoogle search for those libraries
(we are working on providing better UI for those!).
How is it implemented?
We wouldn't have the right to call ourselves a Haskell company
if we used anything other than Haskell to implement our software.
So everything above the level of Linux and AWS is written in
Haskell; and that extends to large parts of the web client written
in
Fay -- a subset of Haskell that compiles down to
JavaScript. And, frankly, I can't imagine accomplishing so much in
such a short time with such a small team if we didn't use Haskell
and Haskell libraries.
In particular Michael Snoyman's Haskell web framework Yesod was perfect for building a highly
interactive modern web site sitting on top of a database and AWS
cloud services, smoothly interacting with git and the GHC compiler. (It doesn't hurt that Michael is
our development lead.)
Naturally, we had to create some Yesod tutorials for the School
of Haskell. But Yesod is used to implement web sites -- servers
that serve HTML pages over HTTP. So how do we embed live Yesod code
in a tutorial? First we have to send the code to our cloud, compile
and run it. The resulting web server has to listen to a port, which
we provide, and send HTTP responses out to the Internet. Since this
server is to be accessed over the Internet, we have to generate a
temporary URL for it. In the meanwhile, client code opens a little
browser within a browser and displays it in an iFrame. It then
sends a request to the above mentioned web server using the
temporary URL, receives the page back, and displays it.
Conclusions
We believe that Haskell is the future of programming and that
education is the first step on the path to its widespread industry
adoption. To this end we have created a one-stop learning facility
for both newcomers and seasoned Haskellers. We really hope that you
will enjoy interacting with the School of Haskell and help it grow
as a resource for the whole programming community.
Acknowledgment
None of this would have been possible without the Haskell
community and the ecosystem of compilers, libraries, packages, and
tools that have been developed over decades.
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