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Comment by tel | Hacker News Reader

A lot of intermediate Haskell material (and advanced Haskell material) is locked up in a series of papers. They're usually well-written, but the intermediate Haskell canon is not well-defined nor is it in a comfortable format; I often find that when I recommend a paper to someone they have a tendency to be turned away... even if it's a tutorial paper not so different from a blog post.

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If someone started a blog where they give an approachable overview of all these papers, would that be helpful? Would such a blog be considered rude since many people would read the blog summary instead of the actual paper?

Okey, this is a question to the parent of the comment I reply to. (I couldn't reply to tel for some reason).

Do you have any example were the documentation available is only scientific or technical papers? I've been learning Haskell for a year now, and even though I've read some papers due to interest I've never felt like it was the only form of documentation.

I'd say that people often reference intermediate Haskellers to a number of major papers like Data Types A La Carte or the Typeclassopedia. The entire set of Functional Pearls are released in academic paper form and provide a really wonderful glimpse into "advanced" Haskell style. You also would probably want to take a look at many of the things that Jeffrey Gibbons or Oleg Kiselyov have written.

I could think of others if I dedicated some time to it, but those come up fairly frequently.

I think that'd be a wonderful idea. Many of these papers have important depth that would be difficult to cover in a blog post, but the blog could easily serve as a nice directory.

The blog would or wonderful. Or contribute to the Haskell wikibook or FPComplete's School of Haskell.

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