We are excited to announce that a new course, Timepieces, will be beginning next week. This course is going to be about building basically the same project, a native GUI clock app, with different libraries so we can compare them. We will first build very simple clocks with different packages, and then we’ll iterate on those to see how difficult or easy it is to customize our apps. Currently, we have lessons using fltkhs and gtk3 in the works, but we expect to try out a few more libraries down the road. We hope this will help bring some light to a really underhyped portion of Haskell’s ecosystem. We’ll be learning some cool things about topics like implicit parameters and STM along the way.
For most of our courses, there is one main author, which we call the instructor, although we both edit and contribute to each other’s work. The Timepieces course will be the first one that alternates instructors. Next week, I’ll lead you through setting up the initial fltkhs app!
This week, we have released new lessons in the Functortown and Web Servers courses.
Writing Functortown lesson 3 was important to me because, while these particular instances (and non-instances!) of Functor are not as fundamental and important as the other ones we’ve covered, each tells us something important about Haskell’s Functor class – and its relationship to functors more generally. If you’ve ever wondered whether you could write an Either Functor that applied a function to the Left or why Set is clearly a functor but not a Functor, then this lesson will help answer your questions!
Web Servers lesson 8 is mostly an exercise for you, dear reader. First, we consider network I/O a little more and write a slowed down server, and then we get to construct some infinite strings.