Presentation for the BFPG

What's the big idea?

• Inspire people to learn Haskell.
• Inspire people to start a group.

Outline

• Introduction - 2mins - Sanj

• The Group - 5mins - Matt

• Chapter Leader Testimonial - 5mins - Katie

• The Book - 5mins (Who's doing this?)

• The Experience - 5mins (Who's doing this?)

• Conclusion incl Q/A - 5mins (Whos's doing this?)

• Door Prize - Live code example - 5mins - Andrew

• The intro won't take 5 mins. I have reduced it to 2 mins. we can use the extra 3 mins somewhere else.

Introduction

• Why we started the group
• Motivation (Learning Haskell is hard)
• The problem
• We don't know enough Haskell to understand the BFPG meetups!
• Intimidating for beginners - we didn't want to admit don't know
• We were part of a culture amongst FP beginners of pretending to understand (scared to admit you don't know)
• Two types of people: Those that had learnt Haskell, those that hadn't. Had to start at lowest common denominator
• We don't have the moitivation/focus to get all the way through the book without getting distracted.
• You have to teach yourself. It's hard for someone to teach you Haskell unless you make a start yourself.
  ....
• October Meetup
• Let's start a study group!
• Someone is handing out tickets for our door prize at the end - if you don't want to win a copy of the book don't take a ticket!

The group

• How we started the group
• Research, bouncing ideas, talking to experts
• Meetup
• Github
• Find an accomplice
• 2 heads better than one
• share responsibility & workload
• As long as both committed, passionate, energy
• Doesn't matter if no one shows
• Ask for advice
• We approached OJ to see if we could run a covert functional group in Brisbane...
• Got some idea from Craig Aspinall
• Miran: Online? book? Feedback, encouragement.
• The first members
• How we ran the group
• Make strong decisions up-front
• Set some groundrules
• Time/date
• 1.5hr lunchtimes - every week
• Set the culture - makes the rest of the group easy
• Set clear objectives for group
• Get through the book
• Rough chapter plan - finite time period - 4 months
• Timeliness
• Not about ego, about learning. No silly questions
• Encourage members to write down questions during week
• "Each member should come to sessions fully prepared to participate. Your study group can't run properly if no one has done the work"
• Punctuality
• Have fun
• Start strong, set culture, clear goals
• Chapter leaders
• Exercises
• Safe place to learn / No Ego - important as
• Difficult topics were broken across multiple sessions
• Always there to help the chapter leaders should they need it
• Lead the chapters no one else wants
• Review everyone's answers to the exercises - everyone has a voice
• Selection criteria
• 1.5 hours
• 3 Months
• Lots of self study
• Statistics

• weeks

• hours/week

• people

• What We'd do Differently Next Time
• Get everyone to research the topic (not just leaders)
• Notes on computers not printouts
• Live hacking sessions (we sometimes do this in the group already)
• Encourage crowd-sourcing of extra content

The Chapter Leader Experience

• Chapter Leaders
• Everyone takes ownership
• Facilitate conversation
• Keep conversation moving
• Have plenty to talk about to fill in gaps
• Prepare exercises for group to complete
• Discuss solutions to exercises
• Open-source lecturing
• Knowing the content
• Pros/Cons
• Setting assignment
• Example

The Book

• One short summary slide per chapter
• Sample Code We've Learned
• Interesting Solutions to Exercises
• Summary slide per chapter? (probably. Maybe skip Functionally solving Problems as it's covered through the others)
• Pattern-matching
• Applicatives
• Data types and typeclasses
• IO
• Other Monads? (State or Writer)
• Example code (tantalizing - not off-putting)
• Basic syntax:
• List Comprehensions, Tuples, Pattern matching, guards, where, let, case...
• currying, partial application, function composition, lambdas
• Do notation
• Pattern matching
• Algebraic data types (e.g. Maybe)
• How does it differ to Classes?
• Monads

The Experience

• Took a lot of time and effort to learn Haskell - more than expected
• Use Haskell concepts as much as you can to gain an intuition about how things work - Helps with understanding the implementation. Eg. >>=.
• Committing to learning (almost) every week for 6 months is hard to sustain
• Staircase analogy
• Realise how easy the book made the content
• Enough knowledge to learn on our own
• Side discussions were sometimes more beneficial than the book content

Conclusion

• Advanced Beginners
• Learning together is fun!
• Benefits of Learning Haskell
• Helps you talk the FP talk
• Understand Java / Scala / JavaScript
• Rewires your brain
• Identify patterns eg map-reduce, filter
• Converting Haskell to our day-jobs: map-reduce, filter, folds
• Helps you get the most out of the BFPG
• Makes abstraction simple
• Learnt more in-depth as a group than individuals
• Everyone brings different perspective
• Tangents: Andrew - Category theory, Javascript monads, Steve - Linux, Clojure, Opensource, Coding By Numbers
• Identifying, understanding and using side-effects
• We want to help get you started
• Ask anyone wearing one of these fashionable lambda shirts about it.
• Happy to help kickstart your group and connect wannabe Haskellesrs together.
• One lucky person will win their own copy of the book - door prize - randomly selected by Haskell itself.

Door Prize

• Show off some code
• Run the code
• Find the winner
• Hand out the prize!!!