On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis < g...@integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
> Perhaps we are underestimating their competences and are > complicating their lives unnecessarily... > Have you ever actually taught an introductory languages course? If anything we delude ourselves by overestimating the ability of kids just shortly out of highschool to assimilate an entire new worldview in a couple of weeks while they are distracted by other things. Any additional distraction that makes this harder is a serious pain point. Consequently, in my experience, most instructors don't even go outside of the Prelude, except perhaps to introduce simple custom data types that their students define. The goal in that period is to get the students accustomed to non-strictness, do some list processing, and hope that an understanding of well-founded recursion vs. productive corecursion sticks, because these are the things that you can't teach well in another language and which are useful to the student no matter what tools they wind up using in the future. I would rather extra time be spent trying to get the users up to speed on the really interesting and novel parts of the language, such as typeclasses and monads in particular, than lose at least a quarter of my time fiddling about with text processing, a special case API and qualified imports, because those couple of weeks are going to shape many of those students' opinion of the language forever. -Edward
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