I have been going at it for about two years now. I have been trying to learn Haskell on and off because among other things, I really want to be able to fix some of the issues in Darcs. However, every time I try to sit down and read through the tutorials, it always feels like my brain will implode from the sheer “density” of the material. For some reason, I also find myself having uncontrollable giggly fits every time I see the word “monad”.

I have been using the tutorial “Haskell for C Programmers” and I must say it tries very hard to make the concepts understandable. But try as it may, I can’t find myself reading it beyond section 1 without having the feeling that I’m clutching at straws.

I have also tried A Quickstart to Haskell but it’s too short and assumes far too much for its intended audience. I’ve tried the materials on the Haskell website as well, but those are also way too advanced (even the ones labeled as “Tutorials”). I have recently picked up a copy of “Yet Another Haskell Tutorial” but five minutes of reading into it, I got bored and started to write this entry.

IMHO there are problems that need to be addressed by Haskell Tutorial authors. If the Haskell evangelists on Proggit really want to put the language “out there”, the introductory material really needs to be redone in such a way that it is accessible even by aging, average programmers like me.

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My wife now has her own blog. She had always wanted to have one, so what the heck. I installed another instance of Wordpress and set her up. Go here and be nice to her. Remember all IP’s are logged, so if I see any of you morons messing with her I’m going to find you and beat the ever living crap out of you (and your little dog too).

I had been using Digg to get my daily fix of news for quite a while now. It was great way back when spammers and those with an agenda had not discovered it. But now it has become a haven for “cyber-bullies”, spammers, “internet marketers”, and all sorts of riff-raff. The recent changes to the Digg algorithm notwithstanding, I got completely fed up with all the crap I had to wade through every single day. It was getting pretty tiresome to have to sort through all the “RON PAUL this, RON PAUL that” and “TOP 10 LIST of WHATEVER” headlines. It got to the point where there were now ASCII-art comments like those found in the *chan sites.

Two weeks ago I found an alternative: Mixx.com. It’s shaping up to be a better alternative to Digg. It supports OpenID. If there’s one thing I hate when with social network sites, then it’s having to go and enter my personal data every time I sign up. So, goodby Digg. It was fun while it lasted.