Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
Beginners know that too. In fact, they often think that practical applications need far more IO than they really do! So to insinuate even slightly that Haskell is "bad at IO" by avoiding it for two thirds of a book, is really going to inforce the idea that Haskell isn't a practical language for practical applications. It's easily remedied by teaching them a little IO up front (to show them it's not scary), and then leaving it alone for a while, having a more thorugough treatment of it later on.
You can show them this on the first page: main = do x <- getLine() print my_program(x) And spend the next 200 pages showing them all the nifty things and purely functional things that my_program() could do and not mention monads until chapter 14. Cheers, Daniel. -- /\/`) http://oooauthors.org /\/_/ http://opendocumentfellowship.org /\/_/ \/_/ I am not over-weight, I am under-tall. /