Re: ANNOUNCE: Draft TOC of Haskell in a Nutshell

"Benjamin L. Russell" wrote:

On Tue, 9 Jan 2001 09:00:27 +0100 (MET) Johannes Waldmann wrote:

...

This could be driven to the extreme: not only hide the word "monad", but also "functional". The title would be "Imperative programming in Haskell" (as S. Peyton Jones says in Tackling the Awkward Squad: "Haskell is the world's finest imperative programming language").

Couldn't this choice potentially backfire, though? For example, many people choose Java over C because they prefer OO to straight imperative programming, which they see at The Old Way.

If I went to a bookstore and saw one book entitled, "Imperative Programming in Haskell," and another entitled, "OO Programming in Java," I wouldn't buy the Haskell book, especially if had already had a bad experience with imperative programming in C.

How about, "The Post-OO Age: Haskell: Back to the Future in Imperative Programming"?

I didn`t follow this discussion very closely, but: Hey! What`s so evil in the word "functional"??! Haskell was the first language I learned (to love;-) and for me it's more difficult to think imperative (e.g. when I have to do some homework in Java). In that bookstore, I would buy a book "Functional Programming in Java" :) . But serious, I don`t think that it is good to hide the fact that Haskell is a functional Language. Nobody will realize how comfortable and elegant the functional way is, when he is still thinking: "Wow, how complicate to program imperative with this functional syntax". regards Sebastian