One of our first video series was about how we run Type Classes on Amazon EC2 using NixOS. We’re starting to expand our Nix content a bit more now, with some introductory discussion of what Nix is, and a comparison between a Nix file and a Makefile which if you’re familiar with Make will help convey what you might use Nix for.

You may have noticed some recent colorful additions to our page headers, such as on the Validation and Web servers courses. More than mere decorations, these are also Haskell demonstrations! We have discussions of how they were generated in our Art section. Today we’ve added a page on the Julia set that you see at the top of our home page, produced using the fractal-hs package.

The reference series on algebras that began with Semigroup has escalated to Semiring. We’ve given the semiring page an extensive update that includes a more in-depth discussion of tropical semirings and some useful thoughts on why you might care about the semiring of types.

This Python lesson discusses a decorator called dataclass. The primary role of a Python data class is to simply hold the values that were passed as constructor arguments. This feature strongly resembles Haskell datatypes, particularly when we use Haskell’s record syntax.

We’re writing the Python course in a slightly different style from most of Type Classes, because it is aimed at a more focused audience. The idea is that if you are already familiar with Python, then we want to leverage as much of your existing Python knowledge as possible as you learn Haskell. For example, we’re not including quite as many type signatures in our explanations as we normally would, and we defer the introduction of some aspects of Haskell to minimize the amount of patience required if you just want to answers to questions of the form ‘I know how to do this thing in Python; how do I do it in Haskell?’ This post is about one particular small choice regarding range syntax.

The latest Python lesson is all about zipping, a notion also sometimes referred to as aligning. We discuss three Python functions: zip, zip_longest, and enumerate. The Haskell translations of the examples involve the these package, which we’ve discussed previously in Functortown.