On 9 Oct 2008, at 9:33 pm, Andrew Coppin wrote:
I think it's just the teaching of the language that needs work,
not so much the language itself.
As a newer user myself, I'd agree with this statement. I'd like to
see far more mundane tasks solved in tutorials. The number of times
building a parser or generating prime number is used as an example is
out of proportion to the times you'd use these things[1]. Just
simple, *really* easy things would be better. Maybe it's just me, but
if I wanted to learn perl or ruby or python or C# I'm not sure I'd
ever see a _tutorial_ containing a prime number.
Haskell is can obviously do some really interesting things, but
constantly having wikipedia open so I can look up whatever
mathematical doodah has just been mentioned can get draining. Even
Real World Haskell suffers a bit from this.
Iain
[1] In years of programming (other languages) I've never had to
generate my own primes or build a compiler or a parser. I may have
parsed things, but that's different to building an entire parser, if
you get my drift.
Actually, tell a lie. I have built a parser, but it's still not
stuff for a beginner's tutorial IMHO.
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