If Haskell wants yo significantly widen it's audience then the tutorials
have to cater for the impatient.
Perhaps it's better to remain a fringe language. I truly don't know.
-- Lennart
On Dec 10, 2007 7:00 PM, Henning Thielemann
On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Dan Piponi wrote:
When someone comes to me and says "I have this Python script that scans through these directories and finds the files that meet these criteria and generates a report based on this template, could I do it better in Haskell?" it'd be good to have a better answer than "to do this you could use the IO monad, but to do things properly you need to understand monads so here, learn about the List monad and the Maybe monad first, understand how this interface abstracts from both, come back when you've finished that, and then I'll tell you how to read and write files". And I definitely want a better answer than "Haskell I/O is performed using the IO monad but everyone thinks this is bad so just wait a few years and someone may write a fancy new nice combinator library that does exactly what you want". There are thousands of competing programming languages out there, and there are dozens that are viable choices for the task I just mentioned. If my response to their question takes longer than the time it would take to find another language and implement a solution, then Haskell will remain a niche language.
I raise my question once again: Must Haskell's tutorials be tailored to impatient programmers? Does Haskell need quick&dirty hackers? _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe