Am Dienstag, 20. Dezember 2005 20:07 schrieb Sebastian Sylvan:
[...]
It's sometimes beneficial to "lie" a bit when starting out. Perhaps say something like "this is a simplified view of things, for all the gory details see chapter 19".
Monadic IO is pretty darn cool, sadly that means that many tutorial authors are tempted to spend pages upon pages explaining exactly why it's cool and how it works, but that is NOT what most people starting out with the language need to read.
I'm still looking for a good *practical* tutorial that I could recommend to newcomers. IO, data types and QuickCheck in the very first chapter, I say! Real program examples from the get go, and go into the theory on why this has been hard in FP before Haskell (or Monadic IO rather) much much later, so as to not scare people away.
I think that there are cases where it's better to start with ordinary functional programming and come to I/O later. In my opinion, an example case would be teaching Haskell at a university.
/S
/W