Meet UCL's Haskelly team

UCL Computer Science Undergraduates Janos Poteck, Marco Concetto Rudilosso and Marti Serra Vivancos have formed a Haskelly Team and are working on a Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Azure Cloud project, to build a Visual Studio Code extension which supports the teaching and learning of Haskell.

The team are developing an Azure hosted toolset entitled SEAT (Scaffolding Exercise Automation Toolkit) which provides a valuable teaching assistant to the Academics and TA in the evaluation of the Haskell learning from students. Students simply submit assignments and resources to the code validation engine assessing the students learning and competencies.

The Haskelly extension has been in development for the past four  weeks and the team had a superbly impressive demo which shown the VS code Extension working intellisense code completion and quickcheck. The team successfully developed the extension and have made it available for FREE in the Visual Studio Marketplace https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=UCL.haskelly. They have had over 2,000 downloads.

Last week the team and their academic supervisor, Dr Dean Mohamedally had the opportunity of meeting Simon Peyton Jones at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Simon  is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).

Simon is also co-creator of the C– programming language, designed for intermediate program representation between the language-specific front-end of a compiler and a general-purpose back-end code generator and optimiser. C– is used in GHC. During the meeting Simon shared his experiences and insight with the team and they discussed potential new features for the extension.

Read more on Microsoft’s Develop Blog at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/uk_faculty_connection/2017/02/13/introducing-haskelly-extension-for-visual-studio-code/