Nota em português: se você não sabe o que está fazendo aqui e não entende os símbolos engraçados nos posts deste, experimente o lado A do disco, cantado em português e com órgãos.

Note: this was the first post in the blog, going by the title “module Syntaxfree where”. It’s reposted here for quick access, as it details my reasons for writing this.

I’ve been writing about Haskell for a while on my main blog (no longer active, though I have a new one). It feels out of place there, though, partly because my main audience expects me to be an economist (I am an economist, as a matter of fact) and read about economics and partly because it ends up being written in portuguese, which alienates in from the vast majority of people actually interested in Haskell.

I am, therefore, starting a new blog to be focused entirely on Haskell matters. This isn’t quite the super-cool math-y, research-y weblog. It’s not a “beginner’s route through Haskell” either, though. I’m not exactly a complete beginner — I understand (some of) Squiggol, (some of) monads and suchlike — but haven’t done any significant work in Haskell yet. Moreover, not having a traditional CS or programming education, I’m constantly hitting walls on places where people with CS experience wouldn’t and conversely finding quite natural the very concepts that people with imperative programming experience find bedazzling.

I’m also hoping that having a formal, public record of my Haskell work will force myself into being more organized and carrying through the end of more projects — as well as forcing me to be more “documentative”, given my aspie-ish tendency to leave things as inscrutable pieces of history that I myself can’t unravel after a few months.

Ideally, this blog should both be informative and helpful for those less knowledgeable than me and illustrative to those in deeper waters; my experience with the IRC channel shows that the wizards are quite interested in the perspective of newcomers, and I’m both a newcomer with an unusual experience (Scheme was the first language I felt powerful with, and Haskell is practically the first language I’ve studied for real) and someone with an unusual (for the Haskell community) academic background bringing over the needs of an entirely different scientific community. (I do hope I can refrain from econopunditting here, though ;)).

I’d ask that grammar slips and bad english style are not only forgiven, but pointed out and corrected. English is not my first language, and while I’m very comfortable reading and participating in online chatrooms with it, I haven’t written large chunks of argumentative text in a while — and a lot could be corrected in my portuguese writing style as well!

I hope this is a worthwhile trip for myself and readers alike. For the time being, up and out!