I’m really looking forward to this long weekend.  I should have a few minutes to work on two side projects: this blog design and learning a new (programming) language.

Blog Design

Hard to say what I’ll get done.  I really need to put some ideas for what I want down on paper, so I can start knocking them off one by one.  As it is, the simplistic look isn’t really bothering me (I kind of like a simple clean look), so I’m not as motivated as I really should be.  Simply ending the weekend with a punch list will be a nice result.

Haskell

I started learning a new programming language earlier this week: Haskell.  This began a month or so ago, when I started using XMonad as the window manager on both my work machine with dual 1920×1200 displays and my 1024×600 netbook.  It’s a fantastic tiling WM that works great in both situations, but the program–and its configuration file–are written in Haskell.  I managed to hack together a decent configuration from plenty of examples and sample code, but it bothered (and still bothers) me that I didn’t understand the syntax.

Making Haskell more interesting (and difficult) to learn is the fact that it’s a functional language, rather than an imperative language as I’m used to from C/C++, Java, Python, and others.  While this should work well with my math background, it’s still a different way of thinking from what I’ve been used to for the past 10 years of programming…  I’ve been working through some material here and here and I’m looking forward to gaining some more understanding over the next few days.