It's all gone a bit .... functional

As my last post explained I am currently looking at a bit of Haskell - which isn't reminding me too much of the ML I did back during Uni, just yet.  This has all come about as I assess where I am in my career and where I might go.  

My last two jobs have been very general - not simply designing and coding, but doing lots of varied tasks: db schema design, db administration, network admin, systems admin, R&D, systems testing, business analysis, etc.  This has all left me feeling a little wide-and-shallow.

Fortunately, I recently read "My Job Went To India" by Chad Fowler.  It describes many things that you can do to make sure you stay employable.  One technique is to be a genrealist - which set my mind at rest slightly, but I do still have to communicate that on my CV.

As part of this generalist thing it makes sense to try out different languages.  I have been interested in computing (hardware and software) for almost as long as I can remember.  My professional career has been heavily Java based.  In my free time I have always played with new languages and techniques but without the professional need to use these skills I have never managed to internalise them too deeply.

That said, most of my 'playing' has affected my thinking and my Java programming.  Amongst other things Smalltalk made me question Java's access modifiers, and LISP made me think about so many diferent ways of composing my code.

I recently met with my friend Oli who I worked with a few years ago.  We played book swapsies - I lent him 'Micro ISV' and he lent me a functional programming book based around the Scheme language.

As I currently have a little time off as Saff and I try to move to Cananda I thought I'd stretch my brain a little look into Scheme and Haskell and try a internalise a little.

Haskell Hacking

I found the first of a set of Haskell introductions just before Christmas but have only now got around to giving it a go.  Here's a link to the first one:
http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2006/12/16#programming-haskell-intro

I had a few problems installing ghc on the Mac OS X side so I installed Ubuntu (Edgy) in a Q (qemu) virtual machine and after learning about enabling the 'universe' respository in sources.list installed 'ghc6' and 'haskell-mode' (the emacs editing mode for haskell). 

I read all three articles and have started hacking with number three - the 'cat' clone.  Things are going reasonably at the moment except ghc doesn't like the 'set' in concatMap.  I don't have a clue at the moment what might be wrong, but I suppose that comes from learning new stuff...

Blogger Dashboard Widget

I've not been a mac owner for very long and it's taking a little time to get used to the mac way of doing things after years with various GNU/Linux distro and of course various incarnations of Windows.

The latest thing I've found is the google blogger dashboard plugin which makes it quick to blog.

Initial impressions are very good - simply logged in and started typing and if this post pops up on the web then publishing will be equally easy.

Currently I don't know how to make hyperlinks, but I'm sure someone has thought about it...

[Edit: now Blogger.com has come out of beta this widget doesn't currently work, damn]