Overview
Lập Trình AhaXu is a Vietnamese-language YouTube channel that teaches Haskell, a programming language used to write blockchain smart contracts. The main body of work is a numbered course, taught in order, with the exercises worked through on camera rather than left as homework1. A companion blog covers much of the same ground in writing2.
The channel is one developer's work. He publishes under the name AhaXu, writes the blog, and maintains the course code himself3. Alongside the Haskell lessons sits a separate Cardano strand: a playlist on writing Plutus smart contracts, Cardano's own language for putting programmable rules on the blockchain, running from a beginner introduction through worked exercises to a comparison with Aiken, a newer language built for the same job4. That Cardano material is a back catalogue; the newest video in it is from November 2024.
Key Features
- A Haskell course you can start at lesson one. Lessons are numbered and build in sequence, moving from declaring your own data types up to the core ideas of functional programming: type classes, function composition, functors, applicatives, monads and monad transformers1.
- Cardano smart contracts taught in Vietnamese. A dedicated playlist walks through writing Plutus contracts, including the weekly exercises set by the Plutus Pioneer Program, a training course for Cardano developers4.
- Problems solved on camera, not skipped. One session spends over an hour building a text parser from scratch, deliberately avoiding ready-made libraries so the underlying mechanics stay visible1.
- Written notes to go with the video lessons. The blog mirrors many lessons in text and adds troubleshooting write-ups with no video equivalent, including a fix for the policy-ID serialisation error that stops a Plutus contract submitting2.
- Course code anyone can read and run. A companion repository holds the topic-by-topic material and the exercise notes, so what appears on screen can be pulled down and tried5.
What to Expect
Narration is Vietnamese, and most video titles and blog posts are too, though a handful of each carry English titles26. The channel is built for Vietnamese-speaking learners; the creator's funding application gives its aim as helping Vietnamese builders learn Haskell more easily7. Someone who does not read Vietnamese can still follow the screen recordings and the code being typed, and YouTube's automatic captions cover the narration roughly.
The format on Lập Trình AhaXu is plain: a screen recording with a voice over it, no studio production, and sessions that range from a few minutes to well over an hour. Lessons move at the pace of someone typing and explaining, so expect to follow along in an editor rather than watch passively.
The Cardano playlist is a reference archive rather than a live course. The setup steps in particular lean on a hosted development service and on tooling that has moved on since filming, so the explanations of how contracts are put together hold up better than the exact commands do4. The creator carried on with the channel after the Cardano work, but on general developer topics such as Linux commands, Arch Linux setup and a from-scratch parser series rather than blockchain. The newest upload of any kind is from September 20256.
He twice applied to Project Catalyst, the community grant program Cardano holders vote on, for funding to extend the Haskell and Plutus course into a fuller curriculum. Neither application was approved, so the course that exists was made without that funding, by a one-person team78. Readers who want comparable material in English will find more choice among Cardano's developer learning platforms.
