Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
(This is a revised repost of an earlier part of my Haskell tutorial.) Haskell is a strongly typed language. In fact, the type system in Haskell is both stricter and more expressive than any type system I've seen for...
(This is a heavily edited repost of the first article in my original Haskell tutorial.) (I've attempted o write this as a literate haskell program. What that means is that if you just cut-and-paste the text of this post from...
Way back, about three years ago, I started writing a Haskell tutorial as a series of posts on this blog. After getting to monads, I moved on to other things. But based on some recent philosophizing, I think I'm...
It's been a while since I've written about any data structures. But it just so happens that I'm actually really working on implementing a really interesting and broadly useful data structure now, called a Rope. A bit of background,...
Since I mentioned the idea of monoids as a formal models of computations, John Armstrong made the natural leap ahead, to the connection between monoids and monads - which are a common feature in programming language semantics, and a...
So, after our last installment, describing the theory of monads, and the previous posts, which focused on representing things like state and I/O, I thought it was worth taking a moment to look at a different kind of thing...
As long as I'm doing all of these basics posts, I thought it would be worth explaining just what a Turing machine is. I frequently talk about things being Turing equivalent, and about effective computing systems, and similar things,...
As promised, I'm finally going to get to the theory behind monads. As a quick review, the basic idea of the monad in Haskell is a hidden transition function - a monad is, basically, a state transition function. The...
Time for more monads. In this article, I'm going to show you how to implement a very simple state monad - it's a trivial monad which allows you to use a mutable state consisting of a single integer. Then...
The biggest nightmare for most people learning Haskell is monads. Monads are the key to how you can implement IO, state, parallelism, and sequencing (among numerous other things) in Haskell. The trick is wrapping your head around them....