my code has a side effect: learning!

So I'm working through the exercises in Real World Haskell. Here's what I've got so far. As of this writing, I'm in the middle of chapter 4. RWH totally deserves all the buzz it's been getting; it's very approachable and well-written, and my Haskell is improving rapidly. The book is still free online, but I bought the printed copy, in large part because Bryan O'Sullivan gave such a great talk at OSCON.

My earlier Haskell project had stalled out due to my not being very good at the language yet. What I want to do is build a compiler for Logo that produces JavaScript, with the turtle graphics on a canvas tag. Logo is an acceptable Lisp! I'd love to see it get more use.

Interestingly, though:

• There's already a beautiful Logo implementation that runs in javascript: papert.
• Mark is working on something like papert, but for Processing -- he wants to put your Processing sketches, how you say, in the cloud.
  
• There are some really nice (and free!) introductory CS texts that feature Logo. Brian Harvey has a pretty serious three-volume set. And there's a version of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist done in Logo.
  

Debian on the OLPC

I should go to bed, but I'm having so much fun setting up Debian on my XO laptop.

It was super-easy getting it installed (instructions here); you use the same command for updating to a new version of the standard olpc software and for installing Debian. Or Edubuntu, apparently.

For extra disk space, I blew away the default Sugar/Fedora install -- it's pretty easy to get back to a fresh state, just in case I want to set that up again later.

In 472 megs, I have the base Debian, X.org, subversion, vim, fluxbox, mzscheme, and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, the install for which pulled in gcc, so was big.

Real World Haskell

In case you haven't been exposed to enough Haskell buzz recently, there's a new book in the works: Real World Haskell by Bryan O'Sullivan, to be published by O'Reilly. In addition to the abstract functional loveliness that you expect, they're going to build webapps that talk to databases, which is not the first thing that pops into my mind when I think "Haskell".

Beta chapters are here.

(if you knew where to look, there was an announcement on LtU about being an alpha reviewer, to get at the pre-pre-release chapters...)