2009/1/16 Apfelmus, Heinrich
How to learn? The options are, in order of decreasing effectiveness
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Reason by analogy from known/similar areas. I think the point here is that for Haskell, this is more possible for mathematicians than for programmers. And that's an imbalance that may need to be addressed (depending on who you want to encourage to learn). But I agree that reasoning by analogy is not a very good way of learning. And I think it's been established that the real issue here is the documentation - complete explanations and better discoverability[1] are needed. Note that for people who don't want to (or can't) invest money, and who don't want to take up too much of others' time, documentation is the most important option. Paul. [1] When I say "discoverability", I mean that no matter how good the documentation of (say) Monoid is, it's useless unless there's something that prompts me, based on the real-world programming problem I have (for example, merging a set of configuration options to use an example mentioned in this thread), to *look* at that documentation. That's where names make a difference.