Heat — An Interactive Development Environment for Learning & Teaching Haskell

Using a separate editor and interpreter provides many distracting obstacles for inexperienced students learning a programming language. Professional interactive development environments, however, confuse these students with their excessive features. Hence this paper presents Heat, an interactive development environment specially designed for novice students learning the functional programming language Haskell. Based on teaching experience, Heat provides a small number of features and is easy to use. Heat proves that a small portable interactive development environment can be implemented on top of but independent of a particular Haskell interpreter. Heat with Hugs has been used in teaching functional programming at the University of Kent for the past three years.