Haskelite: A Step-By-Step Interpreter for Teaching Functional Programming

This paper describes Haskelite, a step-by-step interpreter for a small subset of Haskell. Haskelite is designed to help teach fundamental concepts of functional programming, namely: evaluation by rewriting; definition of functions using pattern-matching; recursion; higher-order functions; and on-demand evaluation. The interpreter is implemented in Elm and compiled to JavaScript, so it runs on the browser and requires no installation. This is on-going work and has yet to be fully evaluated; we present some initial experience in the classroom and highlight some points for improvement