Week 9
Comments on 7 Languages in 7 Weeks
Wow, finally on the last language. This feels good =) Haskell Haskell was hard... Haskell is a functional programming language. It uses static typing like Scala and is supposedly “the most effective type system of any functional language.” Haskell feels like Erlang with the module declarations and list comprehensions. During the interview, I agreed with Walders statement, “Any good programming language really becomes a means of extending itself to embed other programming languages specialized to the task at hand.” Self-Study Day 11) haskell wiki: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell
2) online group: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GettingStarted Day 2 goes over higher-order functions, partially applied functions and currying, function composition, an lazy evaluation. I got to see map, fold, zip and zipwith. Some of the lazy techniques were the ones I used previously in Clojure. All functions in Haskell are curried. And we used partially applied functions to translate a function that took multiple arguments at once to one that would take single arguments at a time. Day 3 went over types, classes, and monads. Self-Study Day 3
1) monad tutorials: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Tutorials#Using_monads
2) monads: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monad
Comments on The Human Factor
In the second half of the book it talks about the political side of things. The author covers the case of E. coli in Ontario and finds system design elements like legal regulations and budget allocations which found its way affecting environmental factors and eventually leading to the tragedy of people dying and getting sick.
The author says that we need to find a way to improve our lives and move away from the technology that has caused deaths. There are ways we can do this, for example, being smart about the items we buy. We should purchase items that hare more human-tech. Use technologies that are human friendly. If we can start making better decisions now, we will have a better future tomorrow.
Comments on Project
It was harder than I thought, coming up with a simpler design. Its hard to create an interface, if you don’t use it on a daily basis and understand the frustrations other people are having. I’ve used it once just to give feedback to the group about my experience using it. It was a large machine, a lot to look at. I wasn’t sure what to look at first. Obviously my eyes immediately focus on what’s directly in front of me at eye level, but I’m still confused as to what to do first. I later found instructions at the top of the machine. However I felt like I didn’t have enough time since there were people behind me. I felt rushed. I agree with the group, we should have a touch screen, one that is at eye level. This way the user does not have to look anywhere else around the machine. In regards to designing the interface, I think it would be most beneficial for us to do paper prototyping and present it in front of different people and get immediate feedback. I think this will help us decide on a solid design.
