Joachim Breitner

Learn Haskell on CodeWorld writing Sokoban

Published 2020-09-27 in sections English, Haskell.

Two years ago, I held the CIS194 minicourse on Haskell at the University of Pennsylvania. In that installment of the course, I changed the first four weeks to teach the basics of Haskell using the online Haskell environment CodeWorld, and lead the students towards implementing the game Sokoban.

As it is customary for CIS194, I put my lecture notes and exercises online, and this has been used as a learning resources by people from all over the world. But since I have left the University of Pennsylvania, I lost the ability to update the text, and as the CodeWorld API has evolved, some of the examples and exercises no longer work.

Some recent complains about that, in bug reports against CodeWorld and in unrealistically flattering tweets (“Shame, this was the best Haskell course ever!!!”) motivated me to extract that material and turn it into an updated stand-alone tutorial that I can host myself.

So if you feel like learning Haskell without worrying about local installation, and while creating a reasonably fun game, head over to https://haskell-via-sokoban.nomeata.de/ and get started! Improvements can now also be contributed at https://github.com/nomeata/haskell-via-sokoban.

Credits go to Brent Yorgey, Richard Eisenberg and Noam Zilberstein, who held the previous installments of the course, and Chris Smith for creating the CodeWorld environment.

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