On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 17:09:36 +0100
Joachim Durchholz
In all, I'm finding it rather difficult to find my way in the documentation (just as a data point for the documentation folks). To make the critique helpful instead of just a critique, here are a few ideas of what might have helped me (YMMV):
Yes, I agree. The best way to learn seems to be to just sequentially read through all the libraries, keeping everything in the back of your mind. When there is no text, look at the type signature and name and try to guess what it does. When there is something odd, ask yourself why whoever wrote GHC would want something like that. There is some stuff that uses technical words like Monoid or Unboxed, so if you don't know what those mean, look up those concepts in google (either web or comp.lang.functional) and read random posts, pages, and academic papers about them. Finally the design of some stuff (esp monadaic things like STRef) is complicated and won't make sense until you try to use them in a sample program. At least that was/is my experience. :) It's not a totally unpleasant way of learning a language, but quite different than with most languages. Also it doesn't work if you're in hurry... -- Ben Escoto