Splash Biography

Haskell is a programming language which feels very different from mainstream languages like Java, JavaScript, and even C++. To learn it, you'll have to think differently. Writing Haskell code is not about plumbing and tedious debugging. You shouldn't have to play computer in your head. Instead of writing procedures, you'll write definitions which express your *ideas*, then fit them together like puzzle pieces. Hundreds of lines of Java can easily become a dozen lines of Haskell. This is an interactive workshop. You will be writing code!

"The real computer revolution hasn't happened yet." -- Alan Kay What are our computers for? Douglas Engelbart (the "inventor of the mouse"), Xerox PARC, the MIT Media Lab, the original Macintosh team, the One Laptop Per Child group, famous designer Bret Victor -- all these folks had a vision for computing. What was that vision? They weren't just great scientists and engineers. They wanted computers to help humans think better, to empower people to make things, and to somehow elevate our civilization. I'll talk about and show you examples of the computer interfaces they proposed, and how they wanted to use computers to create better people.

What if the Allies lost World War II? What if the South won the Civil War? (What if the Ming dynasty managed to industrialize China? What if the Mongols didn't destroy the Middle East's economic base?) We'll explore some of the ideas and practice behind alternate history scenarios, look at a few 'timelines' created by hobbyists, some relevant books and games, and then work on making a scenario of our own.

Sick of curly braces, classes, interfaces, methods, variables, and all that stuff from your typical imperative programming language? Haskell is a pure, non-strict, functional programming language which requires a totally different style of coding. You might have to be "constantly clever," but your code will be way more expressive. You'll get to think in terms of definitions, instead of procedures. This class will provide an overview of Haskell and functional programming concepts, using examples.