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. The number of times building a parser or generating prime number is used as an example is out of proportion to the times you'd use these things[1]. Just simple, *really* easy things would be better. Maybe it's just me, but if I wanted to learn perl or ruby or python or C# I'm not sure I'd ever see a _tutorial_ containing a prime number. 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. Iain [1] In years of programming (other languages) I've never had to generate my own primes or build a compiler or a parser. I may have parsed things, but that's different to building an entire parser, if you get my drift. Actually, tell a lie. I have built a parser, but it's still not stuff for a beginner's tutorial IMHO.