On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 19:08 +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
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.
In Haskell it is. Parsec makes recursive descent parsers as easy to use in Haskell as regexps are in Perl. No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to the thing it does best. jcc