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I actually think that if I did it line by line in the traditional haskell style that'd be more approachable for this project. Kilo is quite a bit bigger. With

I actually think that if I did it line by line in the traditional haskell style that'd be more approachable for this project. Kilo is quite a bit bigger. With respect and praise offered to the author, Legion is a simple project. I think an approach of building it interactively and showing how a developer actually makes the types line up and uses the tooling probably answers more questions about what it's like to use Haskell than you may give it credit for.

pcthrowaway 9y ago
Regarding the Kilo tutorial: a text editor is something that most people intuitively understand how to use, but the author took the time to explain the challenges that needed to be solved in order to create a terminal text editor, and built it incrementally while explaining each problem encountered and then how each iteration provided a solution. I can definitely also see your argument that a smaller and more straightforward project may be easier to explain. As someone at least superficially acquainted with how blockchain technology works, my fear was that a lack of understanding of the thing being built might be a stumbling point for readers/listeners of a line-by-line code walkthrough. However, you seem confident that a line-by-line will be sufficient to explain both the Haskell and bitcoin sides of things concisely, so I'll defer to your judgment, and look forward to it!
- KirinDave 9y ago
  Hah, I think the challenge of explaining blockchains is why anyone thinks they solve distributed systems problems and then working through how they don't. Anytime anyone asks me how they work I say, "They don't, actually. They're really a data integrity system that's being misused, and the current economically motivated implementations (currency) are motivated by the assumption that a majority of computing power in the system is guaranteed to work with the system and not try to take it over." I will probably avoid that conversation.

pcthrowaway 9y ago

Regarding the Kilo tutorial: a text editor is something that most people intuitively understand how to use, but the author took the time to explain the challenges that needed to be solved in order to create a terminal text editor, and built it incrementally while explaining each problem encountered and then how each iteration provided a solution. I can definitely also see your argument that a smaller and more straightforward project may be easier to explain. As someone at least superficially acquainted with how blockchain technology works, my fear was that a lack of understanding of the thing being built might be a stumbling point for readers/listeners of a line-by-line code walkthrough. However, you seem confident that a line-by-line will be sufficient to explain both the Haskell and bitcoin sides of things concisely, so I'll defer to your judgment, and look forward to it!

KirinDave 9y ago
Hah, I think the challenge of explaining blockchains is why anyone thinks they solve distributed systems problems and then working through how they don't. Anytime anyone asks me how they work I say, "They don't, actually. They're really a data integrity system that's being misused, and the current economically motivated implementations (currency) are motivated by the assumption that a majority of computing power in the system is guaranteed to work with the system and not try to take it over." I will probably avoid that conversation.