On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis < g...@integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
> > We are doing our students no favor, no good, in being condescending to > them pretending that they can't handle teaching material that would > actually > be close real world experience. If we truly believe that they don't have > enough time to learn what would really be useful to them, then we are > truly wasting their valuable time teaching them things they would have to > unlearn before writing good and correct code. The education would have > been a complete failure and waste of resources. > > When people teach Haskell, it typically isn't to give them "real world experience", but to teach them an interesting programming language and all the great computer science it leads to. Types, laziness, higher-order abstractions are the hard bits to learn, not a string-processing API. If people want to learn how to deal with unicode correctly, I can think of several better places to learn about it than a Haskell course. I don't think it's condescending or impractical to focus on the things that make Haskell unique, rather than teaching a unicode-correct API that could conceivably be written in any other language. Learning that real human text cannot be treated just an independent list of characters is something that takes minutes to hours at most: someone tells you that there are all sorts of exceptions to the list-of-chars paradigm, and then you read an article or two on the language-specific difficulties, learn to use specialized API functions, and then you get on with what you were actually trying to do. So I think saying that ignoring unicode-correct strings a complete failure and waste of resources is a bit hyperbolic, honestly.
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