Strange Loop

Haskell: Functional Programming, Solid Code, Big Data

Modern programming presents a daunting array of challenges: proliferating technologies, messy inputs, unreliable networks, huge volumes of data, how to verify that results are correct, making it all fast enough. The Haskell programming language is well suited to addressing this broad range of needs, as it uniquely combines conciseness, safety, and high performance.

In this fast-moving, interactive tutorial we will learn Haskell by developing a realistic analytic application: we'll crawl a web site and rank its pages in order of authority. This combines some very modern concerns: network programming; handling dodgy HTML; big data; and number crunching. With our emphasis on getting real work done, we'll show off some of Haskell's compelling features and demonstrate how they help us to develop dependable, easy to understand code.

Bryan O'Sullivan

MailRank

Bryan O'Sullivan is an Irish hacker, writer, and entrepreneur who lives in San Francisco. He has written books on leading-edge topics in distributed systems and functional programming, including "Mercurial: The Definitive Guide" and the Jolt award winner "Real World Haskell". He is a prolific author of open source software, and his startup background ranges from huge supercomputers to tiny set-top boxes. Most recently, he cofounded and is CTO of MailRank, a San Francisco email productivity company. He and his kids spend a lot of time in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where they're likely to be rock climbing, backpacking, or skiing.