i fear that, at this point, this thread is a test: if I post a reply, it
shows that I am a fool. ah well.
JK, of course there are foolish teachers out there. I don't think Felipe
was suggesting that this teacher had the right idea, nor that he himself
was going to stop haskelling anytime soon. But when people in relative
power say wrong things, it makes it harder for junior colleagues (or
students) to establish credibility, with other colleagues and students.
You may be of the opinion that such colleagues and students are fools, or
beyond help. But I think none of us made it to the promised land of
haskell in a vacuum - most were introduced by a friend or teacher. Seems
to me that Felipe feels a little thwarted in his desire to pass on the
favor to others.
Your tone suggests that it's some kind of moral weakness to want others to
get what we're talking about, what I'd call the "what do you care what
other people think?" philosophy. Of course, such a mindset can be very
valuable, and we should all cultivate self-confidence.
Nevertheless, I think there's no shame in wanting other people to share in
our joy - many of us are on this email list because we are
mini-evangelists as well as lovers of haskell. on the whole, I think we
evangelists can be a good thing for haskell, though of course we must be
responsible scholars ourselves.
It's not clear to me that Einstein slept so well (for myriad reasons), and
one can easily point to people who were geniuses and visionaries, who were
miserable for much of their life (Cantor, Godel, Turing, etc). Aren't we
all, to some degree, interested in creating a world where our ideas get
more support? You mention MS Research supporting the Simons - well, MSR
does so in part because both of them (and their colleagues at MSR
Cambridge) are tireless evangelists, who are fantastically generous with
their time, ideas, and code.
One way to go might be to code haskell in self-confident semi-secrecy, and
demonstrate the wonderfulness of our ideas by the results it produces.
This would be great. Another way to go is to teach others what is
*already* known. I think we can all agree that today there is a vast gulf
between what is considered "good", "professional" programming, and what is
the state of the art in CS (and specifically PL theory) today. Hence I
suspect that the good fight can be fought on many fronts at the same time.
On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Felipe Lessa writes:
On 10/17/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
We shall thus understand that a teacher who likes Fibonacci, is a
representant of of the 100% of the human population.
Sorry if I didn't understand very well the tone of your message or if
I wasn't clear enough, however what I was trying to say is that he
makes up the mind of most of his students with the idea that Haskell
is a toy language with poor performance and strange limitations.
My tone was obviously sarcastic, and the reason is that for ANY niche
of human activity you may find lousy teachers. And - in my eyes - you
shouldn't have agreed on such a pathological example that 100% of the
human population consider Haskell a toy. Haskell is being taught in
hundreds of places. That's all. We shouldn't advertize bad teachers.
BTW., almost 100% of humanity don't care at all about the General Theory
of Relativity. And *never did*. It didn't prevent Einstein from sleeping.
Of course, this example is as silly as it is, but not more.
J.K.
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