
On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 17:13 -0400, Steve Schafer wrote:
On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:05:43 -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote:
No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to the thing it does best.
This is precisely why newcomers flounder.
Newcomers flounder because they expect to keep programming the same way they always have. They should be (and *are*) taught better ways of doing things.
Yes, there certainly should be a "Haskell for experienced Java/C++ programmers : All of the advanced things you can do more easily than you ever thought possible." But that's not the way to attract Joe Programmer, who has never had to write a parser. Joe Programmer needs to be shown how Haskell can solve _his_ problems. That might mean that you need to start with an extremely non-idiomatic Haskell program, one that has some of the "look and feel" of what programmers from other languages are comfortable with.
Try it. I guarantee you, it'll turn people *off* Haskell, and they'll never see your more elegant replacement, because they'll never read the fifth chapter where you stop fighting the language and start working with it. jcc