Dan Piponi wrote:
Günther,
A shining example are Dan Piponis blog posts.
When you get stuck, post a comment saying where so that I can learn what people find difficult.
On the other hand, I understand how intangible not-understanding can be, so it can be hard to point to where the problem is.
I'd wager that due to wildly different backgrounds, the difficulties are also different for each person. Lately, I've been dreaming about some kind of (online-) book that covers the missing (Haskell) prerequisites in a modular fashion. I.e. when writing a blog post, you no longer have to implicitly assume / guess something about your readers' background, you can specify it explicitly, something like this module MyBlogPost where import EverythingYouKnowAboutMonoids import MonadsAsComputation import IntuitionAboutDifferentialForms import UnderstandingCurryHowards The book itself would track internal dependencies in the same fashion. Now, tracking each and every prerequisite is impossible, but some useful approximation ought to be possible. I remember a comment about people having trouble understanding monads on #haskell that might be solved by such a book thing. Namely, the main problem was that (a subset of) people simply lacked required Haskell knowledge, like having a good grasp on the distinction between type and type constructor, or being unfamiliar with Maybe. Likewise, it appears that me that a substantial fraction of the comments on RWH are actually about missing or just recently understood prerequisites. Hence, I think that tracking prerequisites explicitly has potential. Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com