A lot of the GNU/Linux community have been switching to alternative window managers of late. Gnome 3 seems rather resource intensive. And Ubuntu Unity is a terrible monstrosity. I have heard good things about Awesome window manager. But I decided to have a crack with the Haskell-based XMonad. I&# …

I am working my way through the Real World Haskell Book at the moment and finding it fun and challenging. In chapter 10 is devoted to parsing PGM files. One of the excersises is to extend the code from the book to deal with ASCII PGM files as well as raw ones. This is how I did it, along with a c …

I have, of late, been learning Haskell following my experience of it in my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks adventure. Now, I normally learn stuff from books, but browsing through Hacker News a while back, I spotted Rein Henrichs’s new series of Haskell Live tutorials. I decided to follow along …

I’ve finally finished myseven languages in seven weeks adventure. Ittook, as I’d oringinally expected, significantly morethan seven weeks, though the actual amount of time which I dedicatedwas only a couple of days more that the amount allocated in the book. It wasjust that the wee …

The last day of my seven languages odyssey has been without doubt the most brain frying of all. I needed to spend about four days of fairly intense study to get close to a viable maze solver. Even now I doubt very much that its anything more than a naïve and buggy implementation. Still, the good …

Well, I thought that I’d have the time to do all the extra credit excercises for Haskell Day Two. But as it turned out I got stuck on the justify some text question. I guess this sort of question gets easier, but I couldn’t get the structure I wanted — a list of two tuples of …

Day two of the Haskell section has been once again very challenging for me. I’m sure that some of the conceptual territory would be easier to navigate were I a proper mathematician. But, after some head/keyboard bashing and rather more than my usual couple of hours allotted to Seven Languag …

The final of the seven languages is Haskell and so far it feels nice. Gone are Clojure's brackets and back to front syntax. Haskell is much more Erlang-esque, which may just be the module declarations and the list comprehensions. It even feels a little perlish with ::s and $s here and there. Tate …

There is an idea, popularized in the Pragmatic Programmer book that its good to learn a new programming language every year. Seven Languages In Seven Weeks takes the concept one stage further, although clearly only for certain values of learning. One is never going to be proficient at any lan …