Edward Kmett wrote:
"Knowledge of Haskell" means very different things to different
people. I'd be somewhat leery of blindly hiring someone based on their
ability to answer a couple of pop Haskell quiz questions.
A better test might be if they really understood Applicative and
Traversable, or if they knew how to use hsc2hs; Talk about unboxing
and when to apply strictness annotations, finger trees, stream fusion,
purely functional data structures or ways to implement memoization in
a purely functional setting, or how to abuse side effects to do so in
a less pure way. Those are the kinds of things you get exposed to
through actually using Haskell, rather than through reading a monad
tutorial.
Hmm, interesting. Applicative and Traversable are two classes I've never
used and don't really understand the purpose of. I have no idea what
hsc2hs is. I keep hearing finger trees mentioned, but only in connection
to papers that I can't access. So I guess that means that I don't count
as a "knowledgable" Haskell programmer. :-(
On the other hand, I could talk for hours about stream fusion or STM.
(Hell, I've even had a go at implementing both of these; the latter made
it into The Monad Reader.) All of which conclusively demonstrates...
something.
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