I've been tooling around with Haskell for a few months now, and since the beginning I've been impressed with the incredible amount of polish that goes into the official distribution.
Maybe my expectations of an 'academic', FP language were low, but the clean, navigable design of the site, and easy to use package manager, and respect for the idioms of the various platforms (DMGs and not tar.gz's for Mac OS) show a regard for aesthetic that that even the 'friendlier' languages like Ruby or Python should strive for.
Aw, stickers! Mine came earlier this week, but no stickers. Where'd you get the book from? I ordered from Amazon because I had a giftcard, but I guess I missed out on some sweet swag.
I'm a sucker for paper+pdf+ebook bundles, which you can usually get from publishers but not Amazon or B/N. I also like that the author gets more.
It's great that No Starch is setting themselves up as the "quirky" compsci book publishers (this, Eloquent Javascript, Land of Lisp). Does anyone know if/when we can expect Learn You an Erlang for Great Good in paper form?
(I'm also amused to see that I'm not the only one who was almost more excited by the stickers than the book.[1])
So now that we have https://github.com/kripken/emscripten and a reliable LLVM backend for GHC, has anyone tried compiling Haskell to JavaScript? My instinct is that the world would explode but I can't be sure.
This is much appreciated. I made the mistake of deleting my XCode 3 installation when I installed 4, which ended up breaking GHC compilation. According to the changelog they've fixed that issue in this release.
Maybe my expectations of an 'academic', FP language were low, but the clean, navigable design of the site, and easy to use package manager, and respect for the idioms of the various platforms (DMGs and not tar.gz's for Mac OS) show a regard for aesthetic that that even the 'friendlier' languages like Ruby or Python should strive for.