On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 9:14 PM, Jonathan Cast
On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 18:15 +0100, John Lato wrote:
Are you advocating introducing existential types to beginning Haskellers? I think something with the scary name
Invalid argument.
"existential quantification" would greatly increase the head'splodin' on the learnin' slope.
Invalid argument. Head explosion is the *goal* of teaching Haskell.
Is it? I would certainly prefer my students to say "This is obvious. Why would things work in any other way?" They don't, but I can dream.
Certainly there's a place for them, but I wouldn't want to see new Haskell programmers habitually approach problems with a "first create a type class, then make an existential wrapper" mentality.
Of course not. That's just translating OO into Haskell. Personally, I would avoid comparing Haskell to other language at all (SOE I believe takes this approach).
jcc
I find such comparisons pretty useful. Yours, Alexey Romanov