Nice small simple real life programming example in Haskell? [closed]

Question

I know, I might be asking much, but does any one know of some nice little programming examples / libraries for Haskell.

For a 'introduction to programming' course I want to show that Haskell is more than a 'little script language to sort numbers'.

I already found a Quake clone (Real world Haskell programming) which is impressive, but too complex for the students to play around with.

Do you have an idea? Maybe something with graphics or interaction with a web service? Something suitable for first year cs students.

Thanks for your intput!

[update]

Or maybe you know a 'fun' library?

Answer 1

Dig around on http://hackage.haskell.org -- there are 2200+ libraries and programs there, many in the games section, in particular, where designed for teaching. As was this jpeg encoder, or this nice mp3 decoder.

In terms of practicality, the core of xmonad is concise, pure and used by thousands of people every day.

Answer 2

I'm going to put in a plug for Star Rover and Freekick, for a few reasons:

• They're games, so they have that "wow" factor for students (albeit with fairly limited playability right now -- Freekick essentially plays against itself, and if you can kill an enemy in Star Rover, you're a better gamer than I am).
• The developer wrote a very informative blog that will help students get an idea about the learning curve.
• Both games some very simple code fragments that students will be able to understand immediately: the Tree module, for instance, or the radians-to-degrees conversion function.
• Library dependencies are relatively minimal: OpenGL and SDL, mostly.

Good luck, and hope this helps.