Hi,
I'm Andrew Price, a CompSci graduate of Swansea University and general
open source dabbler, currently residing in Cardiff. I've been learning
more about the practical side of Haskell recently having been
introduced to it at university. I've also dabbled in Lisp and Arc. I
find Haskell's separation of pure code from side effects to be an
attractive idea, and worth the struggle to learn around, although I'm
yet to be entirely convinced that it's a desirable feature from a real-
world practical software engineering perspective.
> To get the ball rolling, I could offer some practical talks, eg "The
> Haskell ecosystem" (platform, tools, libraries, etc.), "Writing &
> testing parsers with Parsec and QuickCheck", "HughesPJ: the pretty
> text construction kit", "GUI programming with wxHaskell".
All of the above sound like good talk subjects to me. I would suggest
sticking to more advanced subjects or aspects that you're currently
interested in/learning. Introductory subjects could be linked to from
the group web page.
> I'm guessing a mid-week evening would be best, but exactly which one
> is going to depend on membership. I think we should see how many
> people actually join the group before settling on a time. :-)
Well, the group is young; now is the time to experiment with these
things :-)
> It might also be worth getting together socially, for a more informal
> discussion of how to proceed (or just anyway). We could meet in the
> RR room, or a nearby venue such as The Pub On The Pond or The Woodman?
That would be worth a trip to Swansea. No preference on venue, but a
quiet atmosphere and good ales is a bonus ;-)
I look forward to exchanging FP ideas with you,
Andrew