Haskell Certification Program

Announcements
#1

Serokell and the Haskell Foundation are excited to announce a community-led Haskell Certification program. Serokell has developed an online testing platform for administering practical and theoretical Haskell problems. Haskell is a complex language, offering a wide range of techniques and features for programmers. It’s simply not feasible for a novice or intermediate programmer to master them all. The goal of the Haskell certification is to help standardize what it means to ‘know Haskell’ at various levels of experience.

As a community driven effort, we are soliciting self-nomination for volunteers to take part in the organization and decision-making around the certification process. These volunteers will help determine how the certification process evolves and which questions are relevant to the various experience levels of a Haskell programmer. Volunteers from organizations that use Haskell professionally are especially welcome.

Please send your self-nomination to certification@haskell.foundation by the end of July 10th 2024.

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#2

Hello José, thanks for the annuncement.

I have a few question about the certification program:

  • How many levels or modules will there be?
  • How much will it cost to take a test (I guess there is one test for each level)?
  • Are there any examples of the twenty “questions on key concepts and features of Haskell, including its syntax, semantics, and libraries” and the five “hands-on Haskell tasks”?

I confess I am a bit skeptical about a certification that takes about 120 minutes to test any kind of production Haskell skill.
Skeptical does not mean that I imagine this will be totally useless. I think the more information you could give, the higher the acceptance will be amoung us who don’t think there are many certifications in the technology world that are worth the paper they are written on.

I understand this programme was developed by Serokell and I wonder what added value the Foundation will bring to the table.
I am also going to ask if the Foundation knows for a fact that there are firms out there that would be willing to give Haskell a chance, but are held back by the lack of a certification program.

I have great respect for people who volunteer time to improve the community, the ecosystem, the general Haskell uptake. I hope my questions are not just annoying, but a way to engage with the community!

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#3

I’m curious to see what shape this will take.

The University of Helsinki’s MooC and SystemF’s FP courses were my two self-benchmarking /learning tests and honestly, as great as they were, Haskell is MUCH deeper than both offer. 120 mins feels far too…brief for any kind of Haskell certificate. Especially considering how big the Haskell iceberg is.

For example, 3 years in and I’ve never used or understood TypeFamilies for anything. But I can make a working game of Snake with Brick, and do basic database stuff in Haskell.

Would the testing allow the use of tools like Haskell Language Server etc?

I may send an application as someone from the lower end of experience. (2.5 years, no previous programming background, doesn’t use Haskell directly in $DAYJOB)

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#4
  • 3, most likely
  • this is up to the community-led body that will manage the effort.
  • I took a preliminary, rough draft, of one of the exams and I found it to be pretty rigorous. It had me writing some Haskell code that required the use of some standard libraries like transformers. That said, this is also up to the community-led effort.

What we’re currently looking for is folks that are wanting to take part in the design of the certification levels.

In some ways this is a bit of standardization effort: what does it mean for someone to be an ‘intermediate Haskeller’? Any one entity would likely have a skewed view, which is why we made this a community effort. We want different perspectives to take part in setting the standard(s).

I know this doesn’t fully answer your questions, but I hope it makes our motivations a bit clearer.

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