Iain Barnett wrote:
On 9 Oct 2008, at 9:33 pm, Andrew Coppin wrote:
I think it's just the teaching of the language that needs work, not so much the language itself.
As a newer user myself, I'd agree with this statement. I'd like to see far more mundane tasks solved in tutorials.
I would agree as well. My own flailings led to Software Tools in Haskell[1], which taught me more about how to actually do things[2] than the textbooks that I have read.
Haskell is can obviously do some really interesting things, but constantly having wikipedia open so I can look up whatever mathematical doodah has just been mentioned can get draining. Even Real World Haskell suffers a bit from this.
The mathematical doodahs are *very* useful, much more so than any other language I have used, but it helps to have some kind of foundation to understand how and why. I am frequently reminded of a "How to Draw" page from the Tick[3] comic, which went something like: Step 1: Draw a large oval. Step 2: Draw the Tick holding the oval. On 10 Oct 2008, at 7:05 pm, Jonathan Cast wrote:
Parsec makes recursive descent parsers as easy to use in Haskell as regexps are in Perl. No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to the thing it does best.
Is it wrong to use Parsec to parse regular expressions for a really simple regex engine[4]? [1] http://www.crsr.net/Programming_Languages/SoftwareTools/index.html [2] Even if it is the wrong way. :-) [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tick [4] http://www.crsr.net/Programming_Languages/SoftwareTools/ch6.html The engine itself is in Ch. 5. -- Tommy M. McGuire mcguire@crsr.net