Hello everyone,
On 12/12/06, Ketil Malde
Some things took a bit of effort to wrap my head around, but it generally wasn't too hard to get to a level where I could write useful programs. <snip> * I'm already productive with what I know, so I don't have the direct motivation
From my experience, I'd suggest a couple of things: first, I think starting from "simple" ideas -- like primitive recursion -- is deadly. Instead, I'd rather earlier sections focused on less complex applications of rich ideas. For example, in a discussion of rewriting
I think this is the major obstacle. I've had similar experiences with programmers of all skill levels. For one example, when I was TA'ing an introduction to FP course in college, we regularly had students who, once they had learned primitive recursion, would write every assignment (that didn't specifically exclude primitive recursion) recursively for the remainder of the quarter, no matter how much easier it would have been in terms of (for example) map and filter. For another examples, I've spent more time than I want to admit reinventing (or failing to reinvent) various wheels in Haskell (including arrows and COM's IUnknown) because I was fairly convinced that I knew everything I needed to solve whatever problem I was working on. the aforementioned FP class, I rewrote the first project of the quarter from relying on primitive recursion over the integers to using function and Kleisli composition. I'm not necessarily suggesting that freshmen will understand Kleisli composition, but in this case the development of the composition operator was fairly natural for the problem, and when they came back to Kleisli composition later, they would have already seen it (as opposed to having seen a less useful variation). Second, I think that introducing at least monadic programming as early as possible is a good idea. My experience with people who've learned Haskell for jobs or courses (as opposed to for love of the game, so to speak) is that monadic programming frequently ends up regarded as a separate set of mysteries that's perhaps convenient for wizards but not necessary for normal programmers. This leads to another boundary when people who have learned a certain amount of Haskell and even written large amounts of Haskell look at code from more monad-happy projects and find it written in what looks like a foreign tongue. Finally, count me among those who would be happy to contribute as soon as there's a wiki or similar available! /g -- It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.