On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 03:01 -0700, Michael Vanier wrote: > Charles, > > Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is > pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for > anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced > concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to > absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
As a contrary data-point, at Oxford we teach functional programming (using Haskell) as the first course at the very beginning of the computer science degree. I know several other universities also use FP and Haskell very early on in their CS courses. On the Oxford course about half the students have had significant previous programming experience. There does not appear to be a significant difference in how quickly students with little previous programming experience learn FP compared to those with more programming experience (keep in mind these are young people, not mature students with years of professional programming experience). The point is, it's not at all clear that it's a harder language for beginners. Unfortunately, it rather hard to gather decent evidence about learning on which one could base decisions on the choice of language. Duncan _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe