My new communist card game

The homepage has undergone a complete makeover. Design is not really a goal in the first place, information is more important than aesthetics. However, dissatisfied with widespread features of mainstream design patterns, this latest version has some rather unconventional features:

• There is one index page (the start/welcome page) and many single pages.


• Each single page concentrates on its subject. It only has a link to the index page by default, instead of carrying a whole menu and framework around.


• The index page is
  
  
  
  • comprehensive: it shows all entire tables of content, there is no need to browse to further pages,
  
  
  • compact: achieved by putting long content tables into scrollable cards,
  
  
  • communistic: every item is an equal card in the whole game.
  
  


• The latest fashion of many blogging frameworks (including this present one) by fixing the width of the page content destroys the advantages of HTML over the print formats (like PDF etc.), namely that it efficiently nestels into the browser window, be it a tiny smart phone or a huge cinema display. In particular, the cards that make the index page are supposed to nicely distribute inside the window.

Hopefully it works and you like it.

Half a tutorial on the Haskell number system

Dear nice Haskell people out there!

Thank you for your friendly and numerous reactions on my number system picture on different web locations. It seems, that many people feel the same pain when it comes to numbers in Haskell. Even so brilliant introductions like the Real World Haskell seem to capitulate with this idiosyncratic complexity and rather sum up the facts. As I said, I gave up on it as well. But your reactions are itching.

So please, allow me to show you at least the existing half of my tutorial. The missing part is the actual reconstruction of the type classes. At some point, I tried to combine that part of Haskell with a reconstruction of the mathematical evolution from natural, to integer, ... to complex numbers. Here is a glimpse of what I had in mind. I thought, that many programmers could need this kind of update, which is necessary knowledge if one really wants to understand the logic behind the type class zoo.

Originally, this tutorial started off as just a section of an introduction to Haskell itself, some kind of "Haskell for mathematicians", with the ambition of being "the first truely functional introduction to this functional language". What I missed in all the classic texts is a pure conceptional or semantic approach to the matter. For example, they explain "if..then..else.." as a language construct that needs proper alignment etc etc. But "in fact" (i.e. in a functional brain), this is a function of type "(Bool,a,a)->a" (that accidentally happens to have a non-default syntax). In other words, instead of forcing people to learn the language first, before they can decide if they want to think that way, I thought I could start with the philosophy right away before going into the formal details. I cut out the part of the original introduction that attempts to sketch the Haskell universe the way I try to approach it.

Haskell number system in one picture

As part of an introduction into the number systems of Haskell 98, I drew an overview in an attempt to capture the chaos. Later on, I gave up on the text, but the picture might still be a useful reference for some programmers. I think, that all mathematical functions are present, for the string conversions (in particular the Show and Read type class and the converters from the Numeric module), I drew a different picture.

Note, that the following PNG image became quite distorted when it was generated from the LaTeX source. But the proper version is available as a PDF or the PostScript file.

Welcome

After having designed several PHP versions to increase the interactivity of bucephalus.org, I decided to use the existing infrastructure of blogger.com. Thank you.