Month: July 2016

Decided my next goal in life will be to gauge my learning Haskell progress by using it to find solutions to all of the Project Euler problems.

So far so good, I completed the first one with success.

Problem 1: Multiples of 3 and 5

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

The very compact and elegant Haskell one-liner solution is:

sum [ x | x <- [1..999], x `mod` 3 == 0 || x `mod` 5 == 0]

There's still a long way to go...

My tears are always frozen
I can see the air I breathe
Got my fingers painting pictures
On the glass in front of me
Lay me by the frozen river
Where the boats have passed me by
All I need is to remember
How it was to feel alive

-- Aurora

After eleven years of procrastinating, and using just about every possible excuse out of the book not to start, I finally got around to painting the garage wall. The first layer took about an hour and a half, and the second (final) layer less than thirty minutes. In total that's less than two hours. When the builders we hired originally finished putting up the wall in March 2005, they'd just left it as is and unpainted. I was annoyed, as in my opinion they had left a job half done, and I complained regularly how ugly it looked. Thea got fed up with my ranting and said: quit complaining and just do it myself. Not wanting to put my manhood in question, I said proudly sure. Unlike those idiots at least I will finish the job like it was supposed to be done from the start. Eleven years later and it's done. Hurrah, it sure took long enough.

Curious to find out what the differences are between PureScript (a small strongly typed programming language that compiles to JavaScript) and Elm (the best of functional programming in your browser).

Then I need to decide which one to use. First have to figure out what this whole functional programming ruckus is all about, especially as it applies to the wonderful world of JavaScript.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of this fine and admirable blog of which I am so very proud. Fifteen long years of writing on a regular basis, collecting a grand total of no less than 2245 entries so far. That's on average about 150 entries per year, or almost three entries every week. Not a bad batting average, considering the many ups and downs that have passed me by. Back then when I created my very first blog, little did I realize the tangled mess I was getting myself into. But it was worth it.

I figured that it was high time that I finally sit down, roll up my sleeves and really figure out at a deep philosophical level what this whole functional programming languages paradigm is all about.

What better way to do this than by wrestling with the big bad bear of them all called Haskell?

So I went out and bought a book online that claims to once and for all explain clearly how it works, all the way through functors, monads, etc. I barely survived the first chapter about lambda calculus, and it's starting to get very interesting (though heavy-going at the same time). They claim that learning Haskell doesn't have to be difficult, but I've still got thirty odd chapters to go.

Haskell Programming from First Principles

Add this to the collection of all my other books about Haskell, and you could say that I'm on my way to becoming the nerdiest functional programmer around.

• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide
• Developing Web Applications with Haskell and Yesod
• Learn Haskell

Eat your hearts out all you Elixirians and Clojurians.