On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 20:07 +0100, Sebastian Sylvan wrote: . . .
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 second this motion. I've been interested in Haskell for some time, experimented with it several years ago, and then moved on to other things. That first time around I saw no comprehensible discussions of monadic IO (for example, I thought that the fact that when you're in a monad you can't get out was characteristic of monads in general, not a peculiarity of IO). The state of available knowledge for beginners has clearly improved since I last looked. I applaud this discussion for making Haskell more accessible for the newbie. (Now, if someone would just explain how to get reliable performance information while jumping through only a bounded number of hoops ... :-) -- Bill Wood