We had our first DenHUG meeting yesterday. It was just Ben Atkin and myself, but we had a good chat about Haskell and why we're interested in it. We're taking different approaches to learning Haskell, Ben is downloading and studying applications written in Haskell, while I'm reading Real World Haskell, and we're both experimenting as we explore the Haskell ecosystem.

Ben asked me what my expectations were for the DenHUG meetup group. I told him that it was an experiment to see if it would help me learn Haskell. This got me to thinking that I should probably have better defined goals for the group. Here's a rough cut:

• Learn Haskell and explore it's potential.
• Meet others interested in Haskell, and more generally, Functional Programming.
• Determine where Functional Programming works better then other programming paradigms and where it is a poor fit.
• Find out why one would choose Haskell over functional languages like Erlang, Ocaml, or Scheme.

Darcs is an interesting distributed version control system based upon a theory of patches and written in Haskell . I'm considering using Haskell for future projects and will use darcs for revision control for some work I'm doing to see how a non-trivial Haskell application performs in everyday use.

I've been doing some thinking about Cyber Renaissance and the system management problems the company is trying to solve. It's still an early stage startup and we're exploring some ideas about using autonomic clusters of computers to do useful work. This is an interesting problem domain, and may prove to be profitable.

We're looking at using a functional programming language such as Erlang or Haskell to implement this since they promise improved reliability and effective use of the multi-core processors that are now mainstream. As we develop our ideas, we'll experiment with the functional programming paradigm to see how well it fits both the problem domain and our brains.