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+postid: 009
+title: ROSEdu Haskell workshop, first edition
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+date: August 15, 2013
+tags: in the flesh
+---
+
+Last month [ROSEdu][1] organized a set of workshops on various topics related
+to the field of computer science, at the Faculty of Automatics and Computer
+Science in [UPB][2]. I participated, along with Mihai Maruseac and Dan Șerban,
+as a trainer and speaker at the Haskell workshop, since, as you might have
+probably noticed from the Hakyll basis on which this blog rests, I'm very much
+in love with the language.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+The Workshop lasted five days. Four of them were dedicated to specific subjects
+approached mostly from a practical point of view, with some incursions into
+theoretical concepts that couldn't be avoided. The last day consisted of a
+short hackathon, illustrating that someone with little to no knowledge about
+Haskell can in a short time come to contribute to a real-life application, be
+it a simple, fun game or a more complex project such as Yesod.
+
+In the first day, Mihai discussed Haskell basics: some history, functions,
+lists, syntactic sugar, debugging and a full presentation on the importance of
+types and in particular static typing. A few other highlights are Dan's awesome
+talk on infinite lists and Mihai's presentations on GTK, diagrams and web. I
+approached two subjects: xmonad window management and static site generation
+using Hakyll.
+
+Things went ok, generally speaking. Some of the students had already taken the
+functional programming class taught at the faculty, so now they had the
+occasion of getting a taste of the "real-world" Haskell and doing a bit more
+than implementing classical algorithms. Students with more experience in
+software development saw for example the advantages of the QuickCheck approach
+to software testing and the disadvantages of issues generated by Cabal's
+dependency system.
+
+Since this was the first edition, there were also a lot of bad aspects. We had
+trouble doing a last-moment deployment of the virtual machine on the computers
+in the lab. Even so, a couple or three Yesod-related packages were missing, so
+the students had to experience dependency hell firsthand, which was anything
+but pleasant. These problems were only made worse by the fact that I wasn't
+speaking loudly enough[^1].
+
+As far as I could tell from my experience with the workshop, teaching Haskell
+"from N00b to Real World Programmer" is a real challenge in itself, and an
+achievable one I might add[^2]. The ordering of the subjects wasn't quite right
+and maybe some might need to be removed altogether. A more focused workshop
+might also do the trick; for example, I noticed that we haven't talked nearly
+enough about Haskell web technologies such as Fay, Happstack (as an alternative
+approach to Warp/Yesod) or [threepenny][3].
+
+That being said, I hope to see *you* there on the next edition!
+
+[^1]: It's an issue I've been struggling with for some time now, but alas, I
+haven't done any major improvements over the years.
+[^2]: I don't know if this is applicable to other languages. Ironically,
+seasoned C or Java programmers are the ones that complain the most about the
+supposed difficulties of functional programming.
+
+[1]: http://workshop.rosedu.org/2013/
+[2]: http://www.upb.ro/
+[3]: http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog/2013/07/21-threepenny-gui-0-1.html