Heat — An Interactive Development Environment for Learning & Teaching Haskell

Using a separate editor and interpreter provides many distracting obstacles for inexperienced students learning a programming language. Professional interactive development environments, however, confuse and distract these students with their excessive features. Hence this paper presents Heat, an interactive development environment specially designed for novice students learning the functional programming language Haskell. Based on teaching experience, Heat provides a small number of supporting features and is easy to use. Heat is portable, small and works on top of the Haskell interpreter Hugs. Heat has been used in teaching functional programming at the University of Kent for the past