Functional Programming 2016 Getting Help

Discussion Board

There is a discussion board that everyone involved in the course can use for general discussion on the lectures, the exercises, the book, organizational questions. Do not post your specific questions or part solutions to lab assignments here!

If you are looking for a lab partner, this might be the place to look.

Google Discussion Board for the course

See also below for hints on how and where to ask questions.

Drop-in office hours

Starting in Week 3, the teaching assistants have open office hours listed below, when you can drop in and ask questions about the lab assignments.

Monday 15-16: Fabian Ruch, room 6103.
Tuesday 16-17: Herbert Lange, room 6113A.
Wednesday 11-12: Jonathan Johansson, room 6215.

Problems? Questions? With Programming Assignments

I asume that you will try to start your labs in good time, and read the lab descriptions carefully. If you get stuck, here is what to do:

Prepare Your Question -- If you are going to ask for help it is good if your question is as concrete as possible. Prepare the answers to the following questions:
- What part of the lab assignment are you stuck on?
- What parts of the lab assignment did you already succeed with?
- How are you stuck?
  - Does GHCi not accept your program? - In that case, what is the error message?
  - Does your program produce the wrong result? - In that case, what result is produced, and what result did you expect? And why?
  - You are lost as to what to write? - In that case, what did you already try? What do you want to accomplish? How do you think you should accomplish this?
- What part of your code is the problem?
Ask For Help on The Discussion Board -- If your question is a general question, for example "What does this error message mean?" or "Why doesn't QuickCheck work on this property?", you can consider posting it at the discussion board. Do not show lab-specific code in your questions! If your problem is very lab-specific, it is often possible to re-formulate your question in more general terms.
A suggestion from one of the students in 2013:
- I'm not sure how familiar you are with IRC, but in my experience functional programming languages have a very helpful and supportive community around them. From visiting #haskell a few times, I got the impression that the same applies to the Haskell community. So, if you get stuck and you can concisely describe your issue, then the best use of your time is probably not posting on StackOverflow or emailing the supervisors, but joining #haskell. All the info is on the official Haskell wiki.
  In my case, I needed some clarification regarding polymorphic types, and within (literally) two minutes I had received a very competent answer.
  However, if you are not used to asking technical questions, then please read this FAQ by Eric S. Raymond first.
Ask for help during the drop-in office hours. The labs are graded by the course assistants (who know what is needed to pass the labs since they are doing the grading).
(final resort!) Ask For Help by E-Mail -- If all else fails, you can try to send us e-mail with a question: send to hallgren, ... (at chalmers.se).
Here, it is more important than ever to have a well-prepared question (see above)! Please do include enough information about your problem (pieces of your code that seem to be the problem, error messages, etc.), but do not send your whole program!
See also this page about cooperation vs cheating, it applies in this course too! If you want to use a free repository for hosting lab code, please use one which supports private repositories, e.g. Bitbucket.