Why is Haskell’s Website Awesome?

I love computer science and programming languages, and I usually go over to different websites that describe their computer language – whether it’s Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, etc. Today I visited Haskell’s website, and it blew my mind on how well they designed the landing page.
 
When you land on homepages of some of the popular computer science languages (like C/C++/PERL/PHP, etc.), you get bombarded with useless things like latest edits/update to the syntax or code, some unknown/complex syntax that you might use once in a blue moon, conferences, and some news that’s highly irrelevant for a beginner coder.
 
Most of these websites do not address the subject of “Hey new person, how can we help you get started in this language immediately?”
My assumption, based on the behavior on StackOverflow, the largest traffic drivers to those programming sites are for documentation purposes. And most of the time, those who want documentation are not familiar with the language, like me, and visit either the parent site, or roam around StackOverflow, in order to find an answer to a coding problem.
After solving some of the coding problems, I sometimes wishes there were good basic tutorials to help programmers get started immediately without the hassle of going through StackOverflow or copy-pasting code.
 
While browsing Reddit, I stumbled upon this graph at r/dataisbeautiful that showed the behavior of users on StackOverflow throughout the day. As you can see, during the evening, many Haskell programmers lurk on StackOverflow, which piqued my curiosity about Haskell. So I decided to investigate what Haskell is, and learn what’s going on.

 

I stumbled upon Haskell’s website, and really really loved their landing page which is a straight up introduction and tutorial on how to use Haskell! For beginners, it helps them to pick up coding quickly using Haskell, for more advanced developers, they can see all the components and details as they go through the tutorial.

Another cool feature of Haskell’s landing page is the URL updates as you go through the tutorial – making it easy to pick up where you left off.

Here’s Haskell’s website if you’d like to try out their tutorial: https://www.haskell.org/
 
If Education in the field of Computer Science should be represented in some form of way, this is it 🙂 Engage the user immediately through an interactive learning environment.
Video

Why do we solve for X? [Infographics]

I’m taking a course on Udacity (Computer Science 101) to learn Python and simply learn coding as best as I could. Even though I have over 6 years of coding experience, it’s surprising how much I learnt by simply absorbing information like a sponge.

In one of the discussion forums on Udacity, someone mentioned why the variables that we select are nearly always “X” – why do we even solve for X? This question blew my mind, and I went out to search for answers and stumbled upon this video from TED:

This information was so fascinating and interesting! So much history and story behind the science of Algebra that I decided to create a simple infographics on why we use “X” as the unknown.

It’s wonderful to see how information traveled in the past. It is stated by both the TED video and information on research sites that it traveled via scholarly and/or trade means. But that brings out more questions, who were the scholars that visited different regions in order to learn about Algebra? Who was the Spanish mathematician that translated the “The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing”. I guess that needs another set of infographics!

Hope you enjoy the video and the infographics!