On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 2:19 PM Matti Nykänen <matti.johannes.nykanen@gmail.com> wrote:
In her book "The Programmer’s Brain" (Manning, 2021) Felienne Hermans (who knows Haskell) says, among other things, that reserved words like "while" and so on act as cognitive anchors which support our brains in learning programming languages by giving a familiar foothold in the early steps.

Haskell has none of that: not even a strict division of syntactic structures for representing control vs. data - because it does not have it in its semantics either.

What (if anything) does that portend to learning Haskell? To teaching it? To assessing the learner's progress?

This is something we already know about: that Haskell is a very different language from procedural or OO languages. The cognitive anchors are very different. (It's also not new: in some OO languages, many of these are methods instead of keywords.)

Which asks a different question: just how fundamental are these anchors to begin with? Which is also a question in many other disciplines which are starting to expand beyond Western-dominated viewpoints. (For example, a fairly major assumption about how human brains process musical chords was recently struck down by careful research into non-Western musical motifs and how native listeners perceive them.)

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brandon s allbery kf8nh