Michael Vanier wrote:
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
I disagree, based on seeing my wife learn some Haskell with basically no previous experience programming. It was thrilling to see her learn some concepts almost instantly that it actually took me a while to understand because I had preconceived notions of how programming should work. When I talk about how other programming languages do things she thinks it's stupid. For example, I mentioned that you can actually change the values of variables in most other programming languages, and often have to, and she asked how anything understandable gets written that way. I also noticed that when I kept emphasizing that you can pass functions as parameters to other functions she was getting bored; it seemed that it simply would not have made sense any other way. I see no reason why learning more concepts on top of this foundation should be all that hard for her. - Jake