I'm not sure where I got this or how it ended up on my "to read" list, but I'm really quite blown away by it. It amazes me to know that some hardcore Haskell guy somewhere is busy shoving ideas like monads into commonplace languages like Visual Basic. I had also never stopped to consider that Visual Basic is indeed interesting because it embraces the idea "static typing where possible, dynamic typing where needed."
In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B
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We are all Haskell programmers now!