-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 11/28/10 08:47 , Florian Weimer wrote:
* Gregory Collins:
* Andrew Coppin:
Hypothesis: The fact that the average Haskeller thinks that this kind of dense cryptic material is "pretty garden-variety" notation possibly explains why normal people think Haskell is scary.
That's ridiculous. You're comparing apples to oranges: using Haskell and understanding the underlying theory are two completely different things.
I could imagine that the theory could be quite helpful for accepting nagging limitations. I'm not an experienced Haskell programmer, though, but that's what I noticed when using other languages.
Yes and no; for example, it's enough to know that System F (the type system used by GHC) can't describe dependent types, without needing to know *why*. A brief overview is more useful in this case. This is true of most of the ML-ish languages: they're based on rigorous mathematical principles, but those principles are sufficiently high level that there isn't a whole lot of point in teaching them as part of teaching the languages. The concepts behind other languages are rarely based in anything quite as high level, and moreover often take structural rather than mathematical form, so understanding them *does* help. (An example of this is C++ templates; as I understand it, there *is* mathematics behind them, but many of their behaviors come from their structure rather than the math.) - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkz5ROsACgkQIn7hlCsL25VdGQCeLuDo6HS8sfnFG1EuA4oDO56y 5soAoLexEtjRKYIVFFCpWk86u0/woZGF =Fn2e -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----