As part of the Emacs Carnival, Charlie Holland is hosting The Search for Knowledge:
This combines a couple of concepts that I think are near and dear to the hearts of many Emacsapiens, and have seen a recent surge in attention:
- Information Retrieval, or more abstractly "Search"
- Knowledge Management
Charlie lists eight ideas that participants might consider in their responses, and I've used them as my starting point.
This semester I'm co-lecturing Declarative Programming (COMP90048). The topics I'll be covering include monads, laziness, performance, and type system expressiveness, with Haskell as our language of choice. This will be the first time that I'll try live coding in front of students, because I've previously lectured non-programming subjects such as multi-variable calculus and infectious disease modelling.
The obvious choice of tool for live demonstrations of Haskell code and expression evaluation is ghci. And I happen to have ghci already installed, by virtue of using xmonad to manage my windows and workspaces. I also spend most of my working hours living in Emacs, which has great support for working with interactive programming environments (also referred to as REPLs, Read-Eval-Print Loops) and for taking code blocks from open files and evaluating them in these environments. So I know what my preferred tools are. But it wasn't immediately clear to me what the precise workflow should be.