Abstract Title: Seriously, the Haskell Type Checker is Your Friend: a Pragmatic Approach to Working with GHC Errors
Abstract Topic: Concepts, Cautionary Tales Submission Type: Educational Session (50m)
Abstract Summary: An essential topic to become productive in Haskell is identifying and resolving error messages in GHC. Error messages can be cryptic and hard to overcome when you are a beginner. Often times it's helpful when you have someone walk you through identifying what these error messages mean the first time you encounter them. Some GHC errors will lead beginners astray and they will end up trying to solve a different problem because they have misinterpreted what the error is pointing to as the issue in their code. During this presentation, I will cover GHC type errors by showing code examples and work through, step by step, how to fix these errors. I will have code snippets in the slides to highlight problems. Additionally, I will do some live coding to show which compiler errors we get in GHCi. Code examples will iterate through examples of common beginner mistakes. The presentation will show how a beginner’s errors can compound and lead them to misinterpret the problem. It will show attendees these errors are difficult to figure out, but that they have all the tools to debug their code mistakes. With a little practice, they'll be explaining errors to new beginners.
Content Relevancy: Haskell beginners and intermediates (but not neophytes) attending this talk will be able to identify and fix GHC compiler errors more quickly after this talk. Attendees learning Haskell will benefit from seeing common errors worked through and explained in terms they can understand.