On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Sebastian Sylvan wrote: > Monadic IO is pretty darn cool, sadly that means that many tutorial > authors are tempted to spend pages upon pages explaining exactly why > it's cool and how it works, but that is NOT what most people starting > out with the language need to read. > > I'm still looking for a good *practical* tutorial that I could > recommend to newcomers. > IO, data types and QuickCheck in the very first chapter, I say! Real > program examples from the get go, and go into the theory on why this > has been hard in FP before Haskell (or Monadic IO rather) much much > later, so as to not scare people away.
Starting with IO in Haskell is like starting LaTeX with rotating text and making it colorful. Indeed IO _is_ complicated regardless of whether it is modelled by Monads in Haskell or differently in other languages. Beginners should start with non-monadic functions in order to later avoid IO in their functions whereever possible. There are a lot of non-IO applications a beginner can start with, such as using Hugs or GHCi as a programmable calculator. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
