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Comment by zwass | Hacker News Reader

Brent is one of the greatest teachers I've ever experienced. I used to take classes from him (and TA some others he taught) and was consistently blown away by his enthusiasm and capacity for sharing concepts. He has a great essay on pedagogy as well (https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...)

If you're interested in learning some of the beautiful foundations of functional programming, I highly recommend checking out the lecture notes and assignments from his Penn CIS 194 class (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html)

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Agreed! I taught myself programming, and Haskell was my second language. I was at Penn so I emailed Brent out of the blue, and he responded and was so helpful with understanding helping me understand Monoids, not at all judgmental, and so different from all the educational experience I had up until then. And it was serious gateway drug to mathmatics. Funny thing is a few years later I TAed an advanced Haskell class with Stephanie Weirich (https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis552/current/index.html), who was Brent's thesis advisor. All started with Brent!

I'll second this; he is a fantastic teacher. I had the incredibly fortunate opportunity of learning from Brent in my undergrad at Hendrix, where he currently teaches.

There are other comments here that praise his patience with regard to teaching these topics to a child. I can say without a doubt he maintains the same patience with all of his students - not just his children. If you ever have the opportunity to learn from Brent (be from a course, blog, or talk), I would highly encourage it.

I'm glad to see a post of his making its rounds on HN.

You did CS at Hendrix College? I did too ('11) and can't help mentioning it even though I have little to say... because hey, small school, tiny department, it's not often you run into another Hendrix CS alum, even virtually. And after years in "industry" I really appreciate the surprisingly good CS education there for a not well known school

How's the dept doing these days? Is Ferrer still there?

Hi Domingo, This is Dr. Ferrer. I am pleased to tell you that I am still at Hendrix College, now completing my 16th year. We're doing well. We hired Dr. Mark Goodrich after Collins retired (2014), and we hired Dr. Brent Yorgey (the author of this blog post) in 2015 after Burch departed for Google. Both have been fantastic contributors to the CS program and to Hendrix College.

I'm glad that your education has served you well! I'd love to hear an update from you when you get a chance.

I love HN for all these random connections, even if I have no skin in the game!

Me too. I feel like the world is not as big as it actually is!

It's not surprising, it's actually a birthday paradox kind of thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_experiment

Sure did! Looks like you already have a reply from Ferrer :) but I will chime in to say the department is doing as well as ever. I graduated a couple years ago and was also surprised with how strong my CS background was going into industry. It's definitely served me well.

It's still a small department - I think there were <10 people in my class - but has seen an uptick in growth the last few years. They've made some really great hires recently - obviously Brent, as well as Mark. Both are great teachers and Hendrix is lucky to have them.

This really makes me wish there was a way to watch his courses online! Anyone know of any available?

I'll third this! Brent's class on the art of recursion really taught me quite a lot about how to think about problems in a different way.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis39903

His code is also impeccable. Diagrams [0] is a pleasure to read.

[0] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/diagrams

There is an updated set of lectures from fall 2016 [0]. Although I just noted that it's taught by Joachim Breitner rather than Brent Yorgey.

[0]: http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/

This is the text Christopher allen recommended to beginners as the best reference, until he decided to write his own book on Haskell.

After completing that one, he recomended the NICTA github repo https://github.com/data61/fp-course/tree/master/src/Course

Disclaimer: All subject to IIRC

Just read Week 1 of this course - very easy to follow. Although with a different instructor, there are later versions - http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/ seems the most recent, with plenty of updates since the spring13 course. I'll be reading more!

Took a class with Brent at Williams College when he visited for a year. Brent is awesome!! :)

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