| (mild) culture shock here. It is typical for people in the Haskell | community to view things in a rather principled way. A language | tutorial is supposed to introduce /the language/. If you want to know | how to compile or execute a Haskell program, well then, look at the | appropriate tutorial on the /implementation/. At first this may appear | like deliberately creating hurdles, but it isn't, it's merely the way | many (though not all) Haskell people tend to think. They take it for | granted that a new user is at least educated enough to be aware of the | difference between the language itself, and its concrete implementation | in the form of an interpretation or a compilation system. I, for one, don't take it for granted! Furthermore, I think the Haskell community is pretty friendly; for example, a great deal of entirely non-condescending advice is given to newcomers on Haskell Café. I'm certain there are hurdles, but I think on the whole they are there by accident rather than design. (Apart from functional programming itself, which often is a bit of a hurdle, but that's the reason we are here!) It turns out that there are a couple of introductory Wiki pages already: http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/HaskellNewbie http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/HaskellDemo It'd be great if someone would like to improve them in the light of this thread. (Anyone can do this.) Ideally there should be a single Wiki page that the Haskell.org web site can point to; perhaps the editing could bear that in mind? Simon