
quoth M Farkas-Dyck
... I see much praise of Python, while Haskell mostly performs better, is less verbose, and catches type errors. Worse yet, I see counsel to learn it as a first language.
Sure - "Programming for Everybody" is practically a Python trademark! It is kind of embarrassing when Haskell enthusiasts see Python as a better language for beginners. But in either case I think we'd expect only a fairly superficial treatment of the language, right? I mean, for example, back in the day, one of my colleagues picked up Python for random minor utilitarian purposes, and when I talked to him he hadn't used classes for anything, so for him it was only incidentally OOP inasmuch as some of the built in functions were addressed as object member functions. A beginning student doesn't need to learn OOP in any kind of depth. He or she would need to learn about the IO monad, but maybe not monads in general. I suppose that might somewhat limit one's potential appreciation of Haskell's beauty, if we're still talking about that. Donn