Alan Carter wrote:
I've written up some reflections on my newbie experience together with both versions, which might be helpful to people interested in popularizing Haskell, at:
http://the-programmers-stone.com/2008/03/04/a-first-haskell-experience/
Thank you for writing this. On the lack of simple examples showing, for example, file IO: I seem to recall a Perl book (maybe it was Edition 1 of the Camel Book) which had lots of very short programs each illustrating one typical job. Also the Wiki does have some pages of "worked example" programs. But I agree, we could do better. I'm surprised you found the significant whitespace difficult. Yes, the formal rules are a bit arcane, but I just read them as "does the Right Thing", and it generally works for me. I didn't know about the significance of comments, but then I've never written an outdented comment. I had a look through your code, and although I admit I haven't done the work, I'm sure that there would be ways of factoring out all the commonality and thereby reducing the length. Finally, thanks for that little story about the BBC B. I had one of those, and I always wondered about that heatsink, and the stonking big resistor next to it. They looked out of scale with the rest of the board. Paul.