As with any new development endeavor, I needed to setup my environment. The Haskell folks make it fairly easy to get things going. Below are the steps I took to get a working ghci (The command-line Haskell interpreter).

• Downloaded the GHC OS X package from here: http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/
• Realized that I hadn’t read the documentation correctly and overlooked the fact that a prerequisite was to have XCode installed. So I hopped over to ADC and grabbed the latest iPhone SDK (which includes the latest XCode).
• That should have basically been it, but since TextMate is my preferred editor on OS X, I sought out a Haskell bundle for it. Much to my chagrin, I would have to kick up my nerd action a step and check out the bundle via Subversion. The current SVN URL for the bundle is: http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/Haskell.tmbundle/. It turned out to not be that big of a deal…they have pretty good documentation on the TextMate site. As luck would have it, they used the Haskell bundle as the canonical example (see Section 5.7).

That’s it. Now I can actually get my functional language geek on.

The main focus for 2009 is learning new languages.  It’s all the action that I’ve seen develop over the past 2-3 years, but haven’t made a priority to learn given that at work I’ve moved out of being a developer and now manage developers (boo…hiss…).  So here they are, in order (with completion* dates for each):

• Groovy and Grails – March 2009 – Have a pretty good start on this, so feel pretty confident about hitting this one.
• iPhone Development – June 2009 – Books I’m eyeing: Learn Obj-C on the Mac and Beginning iPhone Dev
• Game development in Java – 2nd-Half 2009 – Books currently sitting on my shelf, gathering dust: Killer Game Dev in Java and Pro Java 6 3D Game Development.
• .NET/Mono – 2nd-Half 2009
• Functional Language X – 2nd-Half 2009 – Not sure which one yet…Scala, Haskell, OCaml, Clojure.  Maybe a presentation at Lambda Lounge will push me in a certain direction…time will tell.
• *BONUS* JRuby
• *BONUS* Jython (or maybe just straight Python)
• *BONUS* Android Development

* – I’m defining “complete” in that I should be able to do all of the following:

• Give a 15-30 minute presentation on it
• Write a small-ish app
• Be comfortable enough with the language that if I needed to start a project, I would be able to hit the ground running in the language
• Be able to intelligently decide where/if a certain technology/language could fit in our current exclusively Java environment.

If anyone has good book, site, newsgroup, etc recommendation, please let me know.