Aaron+Cole

=Aaron Cole=

In Class Presentation
My presentation was on lightweight software alternatives, the main idea I was trying to convey was that if you can get down to specific tools you use on a certain program you can always find a piece of software that does only those few tasks and it will do them well, hopefully increasing efficiency in which you do certain tasks ____

External Lecture: OSCON - Simon Peyton Jones - A Taste of Haskell
Haskell is a relatively new programming language which is extremely different to most common programming languages as it is not apart of the imperative programming tree, so it differs at the very fundamentals of what makes the language. The lecturer was one of the creators of Haskell so he had a very deep knowledge of Haskell. Haskell is a purely function programming language, so values are not mutable (think no variables) at first this seems like a scary throught, however once you see all the benefits gained from this style of programming it seems very reasonable. Through out the lecture a piece of software called Xmonand is used as a live reference for code, Xmonand is a windows manager for xwindows systems, it is written in about 1/20th the ammount of code similar managers are written in and is extremly stable *this is noted in the lecture. The lecture goes through the many benifits of Haskell and flys the flag for functional programming languages (Haskell, Clean, OCaml, ML etc) while also noting weaknesses in the language such as IO, because IO is mutable effect so haskell has to explicitly tell the program to allow mutable state. After giving as an introduction to the language noting why it exists and where it fits into the world of programming languages he mentions possible futures for Haskell, one of them being because Haskell is a very good language for dealing with concurrency and currently interest is growing very rapidly; a very positive future for the language.
 * Summary**


 * Link - [|Haskell Lecture]

Notes - **