The Monad . Reader

The barbarians are at the gates. Hordes of Java programmers are being exposed to generics and delegates; hundreds of packages have been uploaded to Hackage; the Haskell IRC channel has nearly hit 500 users; and it's only a matter of time before Microsoft seals that multi-billion dollar bid for Hayoo. The time has come to retreat and climb higher into our ivory tower: we need to design a language that is so devious, so confusing, and so bizarre, it will take donkey's years for mainstream languages to catch up. Agda, Coq, and Epigram are some approximation of what functional programming might become, but why stop there? I want strict data, lazy codata, quotient types, and a wackier underlying type theory. Until then, however, we'll have to make do with what we've got. And what we've got at the moment just got a little bit better. In this issue, Bernie Pope gives a tutorial on the new GHC debugger and Matthew Naylor shows how to interpret Haskell in Haskell. I hope you all enjoy the tenth issue of The Monad.Reader. Major releases of GHC are highly anticipated events, especially because of all the exciting new features they bring. The 6.8 series was a particularly impressive example, that came with lots of goodies, including a shiny new debugger. In this article we take the debugger out for a test run, and see what it can do.