John Lato wrote:
Are you advocating introducing existential types to beginning
Haskellers? I think something with the scary name "existential
quantification" would greatly increase the head'splodin' on the
learnin' slope.
OOP(*) advocates introducing existential types to beginning programmers.
Although it uses an easy name "object" and not a technical name
"existential", the easy-name honeymoon ends in a few minutes as soon as
the teacher demonstrates or the students discover the tricky behaviour
and semantics. It results in the same confusion and head explosion. The
learning curve is the same struggle struggle explosion struggle then click.
(*)Object Obfuscation Pomposity
The broken analogy between OOP interfaces and Haskell/Isabell type
classes is there because some people insist that all languages should be
like mainstream languages. You have heard it, even from reputable
leaders and pioneers: "if you know one language, picking up others
should be easy, they just differ in syntax".
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