On 2016-02-18 at 04:02:24 +0100, Eric Seidel wrote:
On Wed, Feb 17, 2016, at 08:09, Christopher Allen wrote:
I have tried a beginner's Prelude with people. I don't have a lot of data because it was clearly a failure early on so I bailed them out into the usual thing. It's just not worth it and it deprives them of the preparedness to go write real Haskell code. That's not something I'm willing to give up just so I can teach _less_.
Chris, have you written about your experiences teaching with a beginner's Prelude? I'd be quite interested to read about it, as (1) it seems like a natural thing to do and (2) the Racket folks seem to have had good success with their staged teaching languages.
In particular, I'm curious if your experience is in the context of teaching people with no experience programming at all, vs programming experience but no Haskell (or generally FP) experience. The Racket "How to Design Programs" curriculum seems very much geared towards absolute beginners, and that could be a relevant distinction.
Btw, IMHO it's also interesting to distinguish between teaching functional programming vs teaching Haskell. I've noticed that in the former case, instructors would often prefer a radically slimmed down standard-library and conceal some of Haskell's language features not pertinent to their FP curriculum (e.g. typeclasses or record syntax). --