Haskell School of Music by Paul Hudak | Hacker News Reader

Haskell School of Music by Paul Hudak

haskell.cs.yale.edu

145 pointszura22 comments

Its author, Paul Hudak, is undergoing a lung biopsy today. Send your best wishes his way.

I pulled the Euterpea source from the website and tried the tutorial in GHCi 7.0.4. It complained that the definition of

  times (n+1) m

is invalid.

If anyone is trying out the tutorial and gets the same error, replace that definition of "times" with

  times n m = m :+: (times (n-1) m)

and you should be good.

Hm, I guess that means n+k pattern matching is finally removed.

Yes, it was removed in the Haskell 2010 standard, which is the default from GHC 7.0. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/RemoveNPl...

It's hard not to appreciate Paul Hudak, who's at the forefront of research in functional reactive programming. If you've heard of Yampa or Fran, they're children of his, as is Euterpea (which this book is centered on). He also wrote the Haskell School of Expression, an introductory text which touches on multimedia more generally.

IIRC he was diagnosed with a serious form of leukemia awhile back. It's good to see that he's still finding time to do cool things!

One of his other children is a US champion freestyle skier.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700109560/Skier-Jen-Hudak...

H:SoE was the best Haskell book on the market when I was learning Haskell. Great book, but I really needed the depth of RWH to get anywhere practical.

Direct link to the PDF: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/Papers/HSoM.pdf

He was just starting this book around 2008 when I attended a computer music class he taught. Really great class - opened my eyes to the power of functional programming. I'm really happy to see how far he has been able to take this, despite the leukemia diagnosis.

Paul Hudak also has a video of a presentation of some of this material at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtmo6Bmfahc

I'm looking forward to going through this book. Hudak's 'Haskell School of Expression' is one of the books that helped me understand FP, and Haskell in particular. Multimedia applications are not among my current interests, but there were many subtle nuggets in that book that sharpened my functional viewpoint.

Although 'Haskell School of Expression' is written to be an introductory text, I have trouble seeing it that way, in part because of the multimedia aspect. Graham Hutton's 'Programming in Haskell' is a carefully written beginner text.

Functional programming, and Haskell in particular, reward patience. Hudak's and Hutton's books both have a high impact to time spent ratio. I suspect 'School of Music' will as well.

[EDIT - Just looked through it. It is School of Expression rewritten for music rather than multimedia. Cool]

This is exactly what I've been looking for. I've been searching (for years) for a good alternative to SuperCollider and thought Haskell would be great for DSP, but couldn't find a library ready to use. Now I get a lib and a book! :)

Read the title as Haskell Musical, and thought the name was pretty clever. I'll just leave this here.

I loved the HSoE; I found it ages ago in a bookstore in London, while on vacation. I read it to rags. Looking forward to the update.

I read HSoE a couple of weeks ago to see what more adacamically oriented Haskell books were like. I'm glad I started with RWH, and LYaH covers a lot more ground, but HSoE is excellent in the clarity of what it does cover, in using graphics quite nicely for examples (dated graphics library though), and especially for teaching how to do proofs using Haskell (which also includes teaching well how to evaluate haskell code in your head, and how to think about space leaks).

If the new book does the same, and also teaches something about computer music, it sounds like a real winner.

    read it to rags

I like that. My LY and RW are pretty raggedy, and I've basically written my own indexes for those books. (Let's not forget the other books: Hutton, Thompson, Road to Logic, Bird's Pearls (which i haven't read))

I remember staying in a friend's basement flat in South London, and taking baths with HSoE. The book was largely destroyed by the time I got on the plane home, but I was entranced.

i've googled and amazoned and the yale site is down. how do i buy a print version?

There were two reasonably-priced used copies of the book at the Strand in New York as of yesterday afternoon.

Are you referring The Haskell School of Expression? I don't think this new music book has been published in physical form yet.

Yes, sorry. The article link was down when I was first read the comments, so I wasn't aware of this new book.

Use the PDF link another HNer shared above.

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