Forem: LaurentDev

Haskell, what's the point?

LaurentDev — Thu, 03 Jan 2019 14:44:27 +0000

Last year, I tried to learn Haskell.
And it was really tough.
Sure, I've been coding for nearly 15 years and seen my fair share of languages. But this one... yes, it's tough.
To be totally honest, learning Haskell was a really good (but painful) experience.
My first attempt was a failure because there's a lot of barbaric concepts in this language (monads, monoids, functors, etc). And I started to learn all these straight away.

Guess what?
You don't need them to get started.

So, as a good resolution for 2019, I came back to the basics and went head-on with some katas on codewars. And everything looks better. Sure, my solutions aren't optimal (and some of the recommended solutions are really hard to decipher).
But I think it's a good way to learn the basics and get slowly to the hard parts. Like Haskell Fast & Hard.
Soon, I will open again Happy Learn Haskell and Learn You a Haskell For Great Good.
But right now, Try Haskell has everything I need.

By the way, there remains one great mystery : what's the point of all this?
I know there are some examples of people using Haskell for industrial purposes (Facebook and its anti-spam tools, etc).

But why? How?
Can someone please help me on this?
Most likely, my next step will be to browse some github repos but there has to be a better way.

Can anyone help me on that?

How to get started with functional programming

LaurentDev — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 07:10:50 +0000

I'm trying to get started with Haskell but functional programming can be tough.
Are there some good books to get started?

For a better web experience

LaurentDev — Sun, 04 Nov 2018 07:52:24 +0000

I've been teaching web development for two years now. I want to define a set of best practices for a better web experience. We have some great resources in French (Opquast, GreenIT, etc) but I want more in order to be as relevant as possible.
Maybe some day I will find some time to share more information about that (but teaching + coding + parenting take a lot of my time).
Right now, I'm looking for books on sustainability and accessibility. Do you have any recommendations?

The quest for the ultimate mobile app

LaurentDev — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 13:26:51 +0000

There are a LOT of mostly free mobile apps out there, aimed at teaching you how to code (better).

I already went through some of them :

Sololearn : it is great for beginners, with courses on HTML, CSS, JS and a lot of programming languages. But also on algorithms, regular expressions, data structures, design patterns and such. Add sandboxes and challenges to the mix and you get a great app.
Enki : your daily routine to get better at coding (on a many topics).
Codemurai : really great for beginners (JS and such) as soon as you get used to their economic model.
Grasshopper : thanks google for teaching us JS from scratch.

There are probably tons of others but if you could recommend a few free android ones, that would be awesome. Not only for beginners but also to get better at coding (like Enki) and maybe explore new coding topics.
Thanks!