>> I had an idea that I could produce a kind of "portfolio" of 
>> good-quality written documents (various subject areas and target 
>> audiences) and I could show it to people and say "hey dude, I'm 
>> clever!" The thing I posted here is a first attempt at one such 
>> portfolio document.
> 
> That's an excellent idea.

Yay, me!

>> (I'm polishing up my Parsec thing to make another such document. And I 
>> may or may not to a layman's overview of computer hardware - I don't 
>> know if I could do it justice...)
> 
> Give it a go. Worst thing that happens is people say "don't put that one 
> in your portfolio."

Yeah, I guess. (Oh, and on THAT subject there really WILL be some 
large-scale simplifications!)

> Indeed, you might be in a good position to write documentation rather 
> than programs. Consider looking for work as a technical writer.

You're not the first person to make this suggestion.

Unfortunately, technical writers seem to be even rarer than programmers! ;-)

> Yep. It often takes me three or four start-from-scratch rewrites of an 
> outline before I fill it in. Often takes longer to do the TOC than the 
> paper.

I've had *a tad* more than 4 rewrites on "explaining Haskell". Like, the 
other day I found one version from 2004 or something, and I'm like 
"JESUS, I've been using Haskell for THAT LONG?! I had no idea!"

But still, after all this time, I can't think of a good way to explain 
it all in a coherant way. Have you looked at Real World Haskell? It's 
very messy. And it's written by three experts!

Also, there's so many ways to explain Haskell... Do you want the "here's 
the elegant theory that powers the language" intro? Or the "this is how 
you write useful code" into? At which point to you mention lazy 
evaluation? Monads? The type system? Concurrency primitives? Useful 
libraries? Do you mention all the built-in list functions, or show how 
to derive them from first principles? Does recursion come before ADTs?...

It's pretty hard to figure out! o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message