What's Your Reading Style?

I’ve been writing about Haskell for almost six years now. I’ve gone through a few different writing styles during that time, but I’m curious which of these most suit you, my readers! So for the first time, I’d like to take a poll and see what you think!

Here are four styles I could think of for how I would read an online programming article. Pick one of these to vote in this poll! (I’ll explain each option more below if you find these confusing).

If you have a style I haven’t thought of, you can email me (james@mondaymorninghaskell.me) and let me know! Here are the explanations in case you’re not sure.

In-Depth Reading

This is when you’re following the code I’m writing line-by-line, and you’ve got your editor open trying it out for yourself. You’re probably copying 10 or more lines of code from the article into your editor to see how it works.

Quick Reference Guide

This describes when you have a particular problem you’re trying to solve, like “what’s the best way to sort a list in Haskell?” or “How do I do a for-loop in Haskell?”. You want to find a code solution in the article so you can incorporate that code into your own project, but you don’t want to have to copy more than 4-5 lines of code.

This style also applies if you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to doing something with Haskell that isn’t specifically a code issue like, “How do I deploy a Haskell application on Heroku?”.

Learning Code Ideas

This means you’re interested in what Haskell code looks like, but you don’t specifically intend to copy any code from the article into your own work.

General Haskell Reader

This is you if you’re more interested in what Haskell is used for, and what distinguishes it from other languages. You want to read about these topics at the conceptual level without wading through a lot of code examples.

Vote!

I’ve probably done all of these approaches at some point. I’ve written many “project-oriented” series with an “In Depth” style in mind, especially around web skills and machine learning. Most of my work this year has been more along the lines of a “Quick Reference Guide”. The other two styles are less common, so if that’s what people are looking for I’d be very interested to hear about that! So let me know what you think! Cast your vote, and I’ll go through the results next week!