At first, make sure you have Bjarne Stroustrup book
(very important: last edition). If there's anything good
in C++, it's there. Look also at his homepage:
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/homepage.html
I got the third edition and read it a couple of times... It's not that
I'm lacking knowledge of the language, but routine and a deeper
grokking of it's essence like I have with C, Scheme, Java and I guess
also Haskell.
Well, one thing I miss from C++ is the idea of acquiring resources in
constructors and releasing them in destructors, as explained here:
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#finally
(Haskell uses that in 'with...' functions, like 'withFile', but the
syntax in C++ seems cleaner to me.) So, I can sugest you to try
something where dealing with external (out of your control) resources is
important, and where you need graceful handling of exceptions. Also,
it's very easy to write your own memory allocator and use it to manage
memory "under pressure", and so you can go far beyond where
'Foreign.Marshal.Pool' Haskell module can go.
Here is my sugestion: write something to interface with hardware. I
tried to find something more specific but failed in available time, so I
sugest you to take a look at many stuff you can find in thinkgeek. Then
you can try unusual uses for it. For instance, they have a USB
microscope. I don't know if you can move the microscope from the
computer, but if you do, you could write something to automatically find
evidences of failure in some kind of material or traces of chemical dust
in surfaces. Or maybe you can get some security toys and try to identify
people using their faces, or allow them to type text using just the
movements of their heads. All of that involves heavy processing and at
the same time interaction with equipment that can behave badly (like
faces that can just go away from the computer). The nice thing about
this is that in the end you can write a C wrapper over the main code and
we can use it from Haskell :)
Best,
Maurício
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