Experiences from teaching functional programming at Chalmers

Journal article, 2008

John Hughes shared his experiences of teaching functional programming at Chalmers University in Gothenburg along with the successes and the problems he faced. His highest priority was to convince students that they could write real, interesting programs in Haskell by the end of the first course. He eliminated all the course material directly irrelevant to programming like a section on program proofs. He used to taught the material in a different order to most functional programming texts, like introducing Haskell input/output in the first lecture. He also included two lectures on GUI programming (using wxHaskell), building a simple straight-line-diagram editor in a couple of pages of code. He also introduced QuickCheck (random property-based) testing as part of the course, teaching students first to write the left-hand-side and type of a function, then its property, and finally its right-hand-side.