Tackling the Awkward Squad: Monadic Input/Output, Concurrency, Exceptions, and Foreign-Language Calls in Haskell

Functional programming may be beautiful, but to write real applications one must grapple with awkward real-world issues: input/output, robustness, concurrency, and interfacing to programs written in other languages. These lecture notes give an overview of the techniques that have been developed by the Haskell community to address these problems. The author introduces various proposed extensions to Haskell along the way, and the author offers an operational semantics that explains what these extensions mean.