Recurse Center, 2014-06-17

I’ve been bookmarking the interesting links that people post on Zulip and have a lot of reading to do. It would be nice if I had an easy way to send stuff on to my kindle. (pdfs, html, etc.). Instapaper works, but doesn’t work as well as I would like it to. I just want a simple script that takes a list of urls and does the right thing. May be I will write something that uses Calibre, or even better someone already has.
I worked through exercises 08 and 10 of the haskell course, yesterday.
Chapter 8 was about how IO works in haskell. The exercise didn’t involve too much, except I wasted a lot of time on tracking a stupidity of mine.
The next part of the course was an introduction to Functors, Applicative and Alternative. I’m not sure I totally understand and am comfortable with them, but I have been able to get through the exercises.
I think it’s time for me to start working on some Elm tutorials, along with the Haskell exercises.
Also, I had questions about when to use type, newtype and data and incidentally found this section that ended with the following summary: “If you just want your type signatures to look cleaner and be more descriptive, you probably want type synonyms. If you want to take an existing type and wrap it in a new type in order to make it an instance of a type class, chances are you’re looking for a newtype. And if you want to make something completely new, odds are good that you’re looking for the data keyword.”