On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 06:03:31PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote: > 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.
One thing it might demonstrate is the inherent deficiency of using litmus tests in evaluating applicants. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD User Group | MetaBUG dwchand...@stilyagin.com | http://phxbug.org/ | http://metabug.org/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ | Daemons in the Desert | Global BUG Federation _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe