On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 16:16 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 01:50:11PM -0800, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:56 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Most people don't understand pure functional programming either. Does that mean we should introduce unrestricted side effects in Haskell?
The key is to introduce concepts to them in terms they can understand.
You introduce it one way to experienced abstract mathematicians, and a completely different way to experienced Perl hackers. I wouldn't expect a mathematician to grok Perl, and I wouldn't expect $PERL_HACKER to grok abstract math. People have different backgrounds to draw upon, and we are under-serving one community.
False. We are failing to meet the un-realistic expectations of advanced Perl/Python/Ruby/C/C++/Java/any other imperative language programmers as to the ease with which they should be able to learn Haskell.
What part of that are you saying is false? That people have different backgrouns and learn differently?
Not just differently. Some people learn faster than others. These relative speeds also vary across different subjects. I think the implicit assumption in most complaints about learning Haskell is that the ease with which any given developer learns Haskell (or learns a new Haskell library or concept) should be comparable to the ease with which said developers learns conventional languages, e.g. Perl. This assumption is false. In fact, if someone finds Perl particularly easy to learn (relative to other subjects), I would expect that person to find Haskell particularly hard to learn (relative to other subjects). Of course mathematicians find Haskell easier to learn than Perl programmers do; this is a consequence of the nature of Haskell, the nature of Perl, and the nature of mathematics. We are under no obligation to obtain equivalent outcomes from non-interchangeable people. That people who lack natural aptitude, or relevant prior knowledge, for learning Haskell have more difficulty than those with relevant natural aptitude or prior knowledge is in no way a failure of the Haskell community. jcc