First Haskell Meetup

Last night was the first meet up for the San Diego Haskell Users Group. I have to say that it was a lot of fun and probably the most interesting dev meet up I’ve been to so far in San Diego. I have barely done any Haskell, beyond get the compiler setup on my computer and make “Hello, World”. As such, I learned a lot.

1. I reallly love how Haskell allows you to build “pipelines of data”: when you chain together several functions, put data into the top function and get the output of the bottom. This is one of my favorite things to get in F# code and Haskell just seems to make it even easier.
2. Generic Algebraic Data Types: something which was mentioned to me when I made a comment about doing a presentation on “Algebraic Data Types”. I have no clue what the difference between ADT and GADT is but now I have to find out.
3. Cabal might be the simplest project management/build management tool I’ve yet seen. Though I’ve only looked a little at Leiningen, I think, Cabal fills the same role. However, I found it much easier to read.
4. Having a meetup be a 15 minute walk from my apartment is the best.