Tokyo Haskell Meetup
I dropped in on the Tokyo Haskell Meetup (THM) back in March. I’m a little late on this article about it, but better late than never!
Background
The THM is the more English-speaking Haskell meetup, the more Japanese one being Haskellもくもく会. It was started in 2014 by a Haskell enthusiast who wanted to go deeper into the language and the underlying math.
THM is held monthly, sometimes with presentations, sometimes a hack session. They typically go out for drinks afterwards.
Venue
The meetup was held at the Co-Edo co-working space, which was conveniently located roughly 30-minute on foot from where I was staying.
Co-Edo had handy little pictograms on the staircase to direct you to the various amenities that it offered on the two floors. This is extremely helpful, as my Japanese is not amazing. It sounds like they get quite a few foreign workers using the space, so this makes a lot of sense. 10/10 for stair UX ;)
Co-Edo does charge for the space, so expect to pay the equivalent of around the equivalent of $10 for the afternoon.
There were roughly a dozen attendees, which I’m told was one of the larger groups in recent memory. A little over half were regulars, the rest were drop-ins like myself. Two were only in Tokyo for under a month. I’m also told that I was probably the first woman to ever attend the THM.
There was a good mix of experience, and people who used Haskell at work and only as a hobby. From what I gathered, all attendees were professional software developers.
Activities
Most attendees used the time to work on personal projects. There was a group that spent time learning more about Nix. I chatted with the organizer about the brilliant Free(r) Monads, More Extensible Effects paper for a while, and leaned about the history of the meetup and a bit about the software landscape in Tokyo.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” ~ Albert Einstein
I found that explaining the concepts and advantages of the Freer Extensible Effects to be difficult to communicate without having someone read through the entire paper. We worked through one of the examples provided in the README for freer on Hackage, which seemed to help, but it does seem like the sort of thing that you need to work a bit with to really grok. Hopefully I can prepare something better for the next time that I’m in Tokyo (hopefully in the next few months).
Summary
I greatly enjoyed my time at the Tokyo Haskell Meetup! Everyone was very friendly and welcoming, and the wide-ranging discussions that I had were memorable.
Would I go again? Absolutely! If you’re into Haskell and passing through Tokyo, I would recommend dropping in and saying “hi”.
