On Tue, 2007-12-11 at 16:56 +0100, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote: > Am Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2007 14:46 schrieb Hans van Thiel: > > On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 20:00 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote: > > [snip] > > > > > I raise my question once again: Must Haskell's tutorials be tailored to > > > impatient programmers? Does Haskell need quick&dirty hackers? > > > > IMO yes, because it exposes the language to the outside world and that's > > a form of testing. In the end, anything that's not usable is useless. > > Paraphrasing a quote about science in general, "There is nothing about > > Haskell that cannot be grasped by a second rate mind through > > persistence." Let's not exaggerate how difficult and special it all is. > > And the purpose of a tutorial is not to make the writer look smart and > > important, but to ease things for the reader. I wouldn't want to exclude > > the scurrilous unwashed from the Haskell experience, this close to > > Christmas, too. :-) > > > > Regards, > > > > Hans van Thiel > > Maybe there are also patient people in the outside world so that we can still > expose Haskell to the outside world while not trying to attract > quick-and-dirty hackers. ;-) But who are those people? And what harm can they possibly do, assuming they fit the derogatory description? > > Haskell is not a quick-and-dirty language but quite the opposite. Haskell’s > unique selling propositions are features like type classes, higher order > functions and lazy evaluation which make life easier in the long term. The > downside of these features is that they might make life harder in the short > term. I don't know. In a sense Haskell is easier than, for example, C, because the concept of a function definition is more natural that that of assignments and loops. The idea that x = 5; x = x + 7 makes sense requires a complete new way of thinking. OK, once you've been doing it for a few years switching back to x = 5 + 7 is hard. I guess I do agree with you on lazy evaluation..
> That said, I definitely think that we should make learning the language as > easy as possible. But our ultimate goal should be to primarily show > newcomers the Haskell way of problem solving, not how to emulate Python or > Java programming in Haskell. Again, is there a danger of that happening? Regards, Hans > > Best wishes, > Wolfgang > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
