>>>>> "Arjan" == Arjan van IJzendoorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Arjan> Good point, but there are fundamental differences between Arjan> Scheme and Haskell and our whole teaching here in Utrecht is Arjan> heavily geared towards Haskell: we really need laziness to Arjan> write our parsers and our attribute grammars, This seems like a backwards way of approaching teaching the intro course. (Besides, is this really suitable material for beginners, let alone high school students?) It's the common method to specify "We must do this, that, and this in the intro course" and work backwards towards the didactics. I once was a strong proponent of the same method, but I came to realize that it's necessary to abandon stuff that I don't know how to teach well to beginners. I now have a poster in my apartment saying "Kill your darlings." (A Faulkner quote, for those who must know.) This is what differentiates HtDP from all other intro curriculi I've seen: it *really* isn't about Scheme, and *nothing* is "heavily geared" towards Scheme. It's about programming and problem solving, and it prepares you for learning the language you need to know to produce software. (In fact, even if you want to produce actual software in Scheme, you'd be expected to take another course after HtDP.) Arjan> we believe that static typing is the way to go for more robust Arjan> software, we think that algebraic data types are a great way to Arjan> model data and so on. Sure. But you'll notice that HtDP *does* use a completely type-centric approach to teaching, along with algebraic data types. And the fact that you would like to apply Haskell to professional software engineering and believe static types are "the way to go" there says nothing about the suitability of Haskell for intro teaching. Teach them Haskell, by all means. Helium seems to be a great effort directed at that, and I'm glad *someone* in the community finally caught on to the problems you're solving. But if you want Haskell to be as broadly applicable to intro teaching for non-CS majors as HtDP/TeachScheme!, you have a long way to go. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
