Nottingham FP Lab Blog

Back from ICFP

by Wouter on October 12, 2007.
Tagged as: Lunches.

As I should be working hard to meet an upcoming deadline, I’ve spent a fair share of last week faffing about with various ways to generate pictures from Haskell. This was directly inspired by an exercise on Andres Loeh’s course on Functional programming at Utrecht University. I’ve written a few small Haskell programs to generate .ppm images, together with some shell scripts to turn .ppm images into .gifs, and subsequently build an animated .gif from the resulting files. The results can be fairly hypnotic, to say the least.

All we need to do now is bundle this code as an exercise, add subliminal messages about how great functional programming is, and ship it to our first-years. A lot of the code I wrote is directly inspired by Conal Elliott’s terrific article about functional images in The fun of programming.

To wind down, Graham suggested we watch Don Stewart’s XMonad talk from the Haskell Workshop.