RE: Haskell as a first language?
Haskell is a great language! Check out haskell.org. I'm ccing the Haskell Cafe which is read by many people better qualified to answer your question than me. (Since I've been working on Haskell for many years, I am not well qualified to say how it seems to a beginner.) S | -----Original Message----- | From: Charles Turner [mailto:charlie.h.turner@googlemail.com] | Sent: 11 July 2009 22:52 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Subject: Haskell as a first language? | | I'll make this short! Do you think Haskell is a good language to start | with? I am brand new to programming and have been using Scheme, some of | my peers suggest I should use Haskell. It seems "professional" to me. | Has features that a beginner should not worry about. What would you | suggest. (I'm not worried about bias) | | Thank you very much for your time. | | Charles Turner.
Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Haskell is a great language! Check out haskell.org. I'm ccing the Haskell Cafe which is read by many people better qualified to answer your question than me. (Since I've been working on Haskell for many years, I am not well qualified to say how it seems to a beginner.)
S
| -----Original Message----- | From: Charles Turner [mailto:charlie.h.turner@googlemail.com] | Sent: 11 July 2009 22:52 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Subject: Haskell as a first language? | | I'll make this short! Do you think Haskell is a good language to start | with? I am brand new to programming and have been using Scheme, some of | my peers suggest I should use Haskell. It seems "professional" to me. | Has features that a beginner should not worry about. What would you | suggest. (I'm not worried about bias)
The biggest probelm with full Haskell for beginners is that many type error messages require some familiarity with the class system, which is not a beginner topic.. However, a good starting point perhaps is Helium - a stripped down version of Haskell designed for teaching, with special care gvien to producing useful helpful error messages... http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Helium Then full Haskell could be introduced in semester 2/ year2 / whatever timeline suits (Anything is better than Java...... sigh ;-)
| | Thank you very much for your time. | | Charles Turner.
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-- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Butterfield Tel: +353-1-896-2517 Fax: +353-1-677-2204 Foundations and Methods Research Group Director. School of Computer Science and Statistics, Room F.13, O'Reilly Institute, Trinity College, University of Dublin http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Andrew.Butterfield/ --------------------------------------------------------------------
If only for the fact that our little Haskell community is composed of about the nicest set of people ever -- I mean, try asking a newbie question on #c sometime -- then Haskell is a great language to learn early. Not only is it great because of it's community, but it's also full of resources -- there are plenty of fun and interesting tutorials to learn with, among the best are Real World Haskell -- it's actually a print book, but you can read it in it's entirety online, give it a google. There's also a nice tutorial called, "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good" (or something like that), I've heard good things about it. By far the best things you can do are subscribe to the Haskell-Cafe mailing list, and get yourself in the #haskell chatroom on freenode. I believe it was Mrs. Frizzle who said it best, "Ask Questions, Make Mistakes, get Haskell-y!!!" /Joe Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Haskell is a great language! Check out haskell.org. I'm ccing the Haskell Cafe which is read by many people better qualified to answer your question than me. (Since I've been working on Haskell for many years, I am not well qualified to say how it seems to a beginner.)
S
| -----Original Message----- | From: Charles Turner [mailto:charlie.h.turner@googlemail.com] | Sent: 11 July 2009 22:52 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Subject: Haskell as a first language? | | I'll make this short! Do you think Haskell is a good language to start | with? I am brand new to programming and have been using Scheme, some of | my peers suggest I should use Haskell. It seems "professional" to me. | Has features that a beginner should not worry about. What would you | suggest. (I'm not worried about bias) | | Thank you very much for your time. | | Charles Turner.
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Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Haskell is a great language! Check out haskell.org. I'm ccing the Haskell Cafe which is read by many people better qualified to answer your question than me. (Since I've been working on Haskell for many years, I am not well qualified to say how it seems to a beginner.)
S
| -----Original Message----- | From: Charles Turner [mailto:charlie.h.turner@googlemail.com] | Sent: 11 July 2009 22:52 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Subject: Haskell as a first language? | | I'll make this short! Do you think Haskell is a good language to start | with? I am brand new to programming and have been using Scheme, some of | my peers suggest I should use Haskell. It seems "professional" to me. | Has features that a beginner should not worry about. What would you | suggest. (I'm not worried about bias) | | Thank you very much for your time. | | Charles Turner.
Charles, Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming. My path into Haskell was roughly C -> Python -> Scheme -> Ocaml -> Haskell, and I think that this has a lot going for it (though for a beginner I would recommend Python over Haskell, and Scheme is suitable for beginners with the right textbooks, e.g. How To Design Programs and/or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). If you're willing to work really hard, and don't mind that it may take you quite a bit longer before you are creating real applications in Haskell than it would in e.g. Python, you can start with Haskell (check out the book Real World Haskell: http://realworldhaskell.org). But if you get frustrated, feel free to shift down the list I gave. Scheme or Ocaml are good languages to learn the basics of functional programming, and then you just have to add on the Haskell-specific material (of which there is a lot). Haskell is kind of like a point in the language space that programmers evolve towards. Mike
I disagree. It was easy enough for me. OK, I do have some Category Theory background and it certainly helps a lot. Still, I think that for a beginner (without any experience with C or anything like that) Haskell would be relatively easy. It doesn't involve (at least at the start) an ugly notion of assignment. Michael Vanier wrote:
Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Haskell is a great language! Check out haskell.org. I'm ccing the Haskell Cafe which is read by many people better qualified to answer your question than me. (Since I've been working on Haskell for many years, I am not well qualified to say how it seems to a beginner.)
S
| -----Original Message----- | From: Charles Turner [mailto:charlie.h.turner@googlemail.com] | Sent: 11 July 2009 22:52 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Subject: Haskell as a first language? | | I'll make this short! Do you think Haskell is a good language to start | with? I am brand new to programming and have been using Scheme, some of | my peers suggest I should use Haskell. It seems "professional" to me. | Has features that a beginner should not worry about. What would you | suggest. (I'm not worried about bias) | | Thank you very much for your time. | | Charles Turner.
Charles,
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming. My path into Haskell was roughly C -> Python -> Scheme -> Ocaml -> Haskell, and I think that this has a lot going for it (though for a beginner I would recommend Python over Haskell, and Scheme is suitable for beginners with the right textbooks, e.g. How To Design Programs and/or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). If you're willing to work really hard, and don't mind that it may take you quite a bit longer before you are creating real applications in Haskell than it would in e.g. Python, you can start with Haskell (check out the book Real World Haskell: http://realworldhaskell.org). But if you get frustrated, feel free to shift down the list I gave. Scheme or Ocaml are good languages to learn the basics of functional programming, and then you just have to add on the Haskell-specific material (of which there is a lot). Haskell is kind of like a point in the language space that programmers evolve towards.
Mike
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Hello Michael, Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 2:01:44 PM, you wrote:
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner.
i believe that Haskell is hard for intermediate programmers already knowing any imperative language, but for beginners it should be ideal -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
I agree -- I think the most major learning curve problem (for me) was not learning haskell directly, it was un-learning all those patterns and workarounds and so on from imperative/OOP languages. Of course, the only problem with learning haskell first is that one will probably be mildly annoyed by most of the more common programming languages ;-) -Ross On Jul 14, 2009, at 6:22 AM, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Hello Michael,
Tuesday, July 14, 2009, 2:01:44 PM, you wrote:
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner.
i believe that Haskell is hard for intermediate programmers already knowing any imperative language, but for beginners it should be ideal
-- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
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On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 03:01 -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
Charles,
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
As a contrary data-point, at Oxford we teach functional programming (using Haskell) as the first course at the very beginning of the computer science degree. I know several other universities also use FP and Haskell very early on in their CS courses. On the Oxford course about half the students have had significant previous programming experience. There does not appear to be a significant difference in how quickly students with little previous programming experience learn FP compared to those with more programming experience (keep in mind these are young people, not mature students with years of professional programming experience). The point is, it's not at all clear that it's a harder language for beginners. Unfortunately, it rather hard to gather decent evidence about learning on which one could base decisions on the choice of language. Duncan
On 14 Jul 2009, at 13:48, Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 03:01 -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
Charles,
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
As a contrary data-point, at Oxford we teach functional programming (using Haskell) as the first course at the very beginning of the computer science degree. I know several other universities also use FP and Haskell very early on in their CS courses. On the Oxford course about half the students have had significant previous programming experience. There does not appear to be a significant difference in how quickly students with little previous programming experience learn FP compared to those with more programming experience (keep in mind these are young people, not mature students with years of professional programming experience).
The point is, it's not at all clear that it's a harder language for beginners. Unfortunately, it rather hard to gather decent evidence about learning on which one could base decisions on the choice of language.
What I'd be interested to see is how fast beginners pick up haskell compared to imperative language – is it actually hard to learn, or do we just forget how hard it was to learn a new paradigm when we first learned imperative programming. I guess it's rather hard to establish a metric for how fast the learning occurs though. Bob
Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 03:01 -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
Charles,
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
As a contrary data-point, at Oxford we teach functional programming (using Haskell) as the first course at the very beginning of the computer science degree. I know several other universities also use FP and Haskell very early on in their CS courses.
At Minho we've been using Haskell as first programming course in CS degrees since 1997-98. Such a 'functional first' approach is the natural way to start a background on programming. Look at the hardware side, for instance: which of the following kinds of digital system is taught first: combinatorial (eg. nand, nor gates) or sequential (eg. flip-flops)? The first, of course, because such circuits are functional (no state, no feedback). More recently I had a go at teaching Haskell to beginners in a non CS context (to arts students studying musicology, actually). If you are interested, have a look at the slides available from the course's URL: www.di.uminho.pt/~jno/html/ipm.html#sec:mp (Under Acrobat some scores will start playing music once you click the "pin" symbol on the right.) All comments, suggestions etc are welcome. jno
Michael Vanier wrote:
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
I disagree, based on seeing my wife learn some Haskell with basically no previous experience programming. It was thrilling to see her learn some concepts almost instantly that it actually took me a while to understand because I had preconceived notions of how programming should work. When I talk about how other programming languages do things she thinks it's stupid. For example, I mentioned that you can actually change the values of variables in most other programming languages, and often have to, and she asked how anything understandable gets written that way. I also noticed that when I kept emphasizing that you can pass functions as parameters to other functions she was getting bored; it seemed that it simply would not have made sense any other way. I see no reason why learning more concepts on top of this foundation should be all that hard for her. - Jake
At Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:01:44 -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
Haskell is a wonderful language (my favorite language by far) but it is pretty difficult for a beginner. In fact, it is pretty difficult for anyone to learn in my experience, because it has so many advanced concepts that simply don't exist in other languages, and trying to absorb them all at once will likely be overwhelming.
I think that all programming languages are hard to learn, because it involves a new way of thinking. It maybe be that Haskell is harder to learn as your *second* language because you have to unlearn things. Especially if your first language was something like C or Python. Additionally, I suspect people forget how hard it was to learn their first language. They get used to the idea that if they know Python, they can learn Ruby with out to much difficulty. But that is only because Python and Ruby share a lot in common. When moving from Python to Haskell, there is simply more to learn (and unlearn). But, if you start by knowing nothing, then it is not clear that you have to learn more to learn Haskell than you would some other language. Also, Haskell may be easier to learn because it's concepts are more 'pricipled' and 'sensible'. Imperative languages tend to allow all sorts of silly errors. For example, letting you use unitialized variables (nearly impossible to do in Haskell). And automatic type casting has burned me so many times. (Especially automatic conversion between floating ponit numbers and integers.) I seldom get off-by-one errors in Haskell, but I do get them in imperative/OOP languages. I suspect that if you don't know any language and want to become a Haskell expert as quickly as possible, then the quickest, straigtest path is to start with Haskell. Also, it depends on what you mean by 'learn' and 'Haskell'. Just as a beginning C++ programmer is not going to learn about templates on day one, a beginner Haskell programmer probably won't be learning type families on day one. Additionally, Haskell includes numerous libraries which are not part of the language itself. Things like parser combinators, pretty printing, applicative functors, etc, are all just libraries. But each of those libraries brings a bunch of new concepts. - jeremy
It maybe be that Haskell is harder to learn as your *second* language because you have to unlearn things. Especially if your first language was something like C or Python.
Python is not too bad. You can nearly use it a as a strict functional programming language. While this is not the idiomatic style to use python in, it sure eases transition to a real functional language (compared to say, C). Also Python has no pointers, but does have garbage collection.
Before teaching any data structure course, one MUST learn functional languages with ADTs. It makes everything so easy to understand. So, it MUST be a first language in every institution. The biggest reason that one should learn functional languages with algebraic data type(ADT)s first is because understanding recursive definitions. If you recursion first, understanding iteration and mutable data structures are dead simple and easy: they are just alternate representation or optimization. However, when you learn while loops and for loops first, your brain gets damaged and a lot of students gets stuck when they first see the Tower of Hanoi, the notorious in-place quicksort routine written in imperative languages, you'll get to think of recursion as some stack blowing up monster that must be unrolled and managed manually. Furthermore, learning data structures in most traditional imperative language literature gives you the impression that linked list and binary trees are brain-fucking spaghetti monsters of memory pointers all the cells, which is a dead simple recursive definition in functional languages with ADTs. Personally, I never really understood what linked list was before I learned ML and Haskell, although I've used doubly linked list in a C++ standard library, which was to me a black box that meets the specification in some huge standard document, for two years.
I believe that from Scheme to Haskell is a natural transition, as I
made the same transition myself. If you grasp the fundamental concepts
of Scheme, Haskell seems like a step up. I will describe Haskell in
terms of Scheme:
# Haskell programs are more correct from the ground up
Scheme will let you write (+ 2 "2") and only tell you that it's wrong
when it tries to run it ("You can't add a number and a string!"),
whereas Haskell won't even let you run it until the types are correct.
What some find difficult is ``1'' has type Num a => a, which means
"for all types a that are Numbers, a" (or just "all Number types"),
e.g. Integer, Double, Rational, etc. But this concept is found Scheme
-- in Scheme you have all sorts of number types; ``+'' means "add two
numbers". In Haskell, we specify that notion explicitly.
# Haskell is half wordy as Scheme
Indeed, that is what drew me to Haskell away from Scheme.
## Problem 1
Consider the problem ``Double all the numbers in a list." In Scheme we
might solve this problem like so:
(map (lambda (n) (* n 2)) '(1 2 3 4)
and the result would be (2 4 6).
In Haskell, we can write the same:
map (\n -> n * 2) [1,2,3,4]
and the result would be [2,4,6].
But we take it one step further:
map (*2) [1,2,3,4]
This means the same as the previous Haskell example. But the formal
parameter ``x'' has been tripped away because it is redundant.
## Problem 2
Another problem, ``Given a list of lists, reverse all the lists and
double each number in them.'' So in Scheme, we might solve this like
so:
(map (lambda (list)
(reverse (map (lambda (n) (* n 2)) list)))
'(1 2 3 4 5))
In Haskell, the same solution is rendered thusly:
map (reverse . map (*2)) [1,2,3,4]
The ``foo . bar'' is equivalent to (\x -> foo (bar x)), or, in Scheme
(lambda (x) (foo (bar x))). It's just that we have stripped the
redundant formal parameters.
## Problem 3
Suppose our problem is ``Multiply the first three items of a list''.
Our Scheme solution might be:
(define (first-three-sum list) (* (car list) (cadr list) (caddr list)))
In Haskell, we may write (admittedly, a better way to render this
might be: firstThreeSum = sum . take 3):
firstThreeSum (x:y:z:_) = x * y * z
Here I have demonstrated pattern matching, a powerful and oft-used
feature of Haskell for deconstructing a data structure, like a list or
a tuple, based on a pattern.
I'll abruptly stop here before I write a whole article. I'll summarize
by saying that Haskell is the next step, a natural progression where
things that you know all too well from Scheme become easier, and
safer. The stuff described here is just the tip of the ice burg, of
course. I wish that I had learned Haskell as my first programming
language! Haskell takes a lot of effort to learn, but gives back in
equal amounts. It is a rough ride to learn any programming language.
If you think otherwise, you are not learning, or are learning wrongly.
2009/7/14 Simon Peyton-Jones
Haskell is a great language! Check out haskell.org. I'm ccing the Haskell Cafe which is read by many people better qualified to answer your question than me. (Since I've been working on Haskell for many years, I am not well qualified to say how it seems to a beginner.)
S
| -----Original Message----- | From: Charles Turner [mailto:charlie.h.turner@googlemail.com] | Sent: 11 July 2009 22:52 | To: Simon Peyton-Jones | Subject: Haskell as a first language? | | I'll make this short! Do you think Haskell is a good language to start | with? I am brand new to programming and have been using Scheme, some of | my peers suggest I should use Haskell. It seems "professional" to me. | Has features that a beginner should not worry about. What would you | suggest. (I'm not worried about bias) | | Thank you very much for your time. | | Charles Turner.
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In an ideal world, Haskell would be a perfect first programming language. But consider: If someone without any programming background learns Haskell as first language, she or he might have big problems using any other language after that. Unlearning what you can do with Haskell is much harder than unlearning imperative thinking. (I had to learn PHP after I was used to write in Haskell, and it was no fun) I don't want to miss the great experience of learning Haskell *after* Scheme (and Scheme after C), and I would not like to deprieve anybody of such an experience. Or what should they have for dessert? I don't know if that's a good argument. Best regards, Daniel
dvde:
In an ideal world, Haskell would be a perfect first programming language.
But consider: If someone without any programming background learns Haskell as first language, she or he might have big problems using any other language after that. Unlearning what you can do with Haskell is much harder than unlearning imperative thinking. (I had to learn PHP after I was used to write in Haskell, and it was no fun) I don't want to miss the great experience of learning Haskell *after* Scheme (and Scheme after C), and I would not like to deprieve anybody of such an experience. Or what should they have for dessert?
FWIW, thousands of students from UNSW in Sydney learned Haskell as their first language throughout the 90s, before taking courses in C, Java, some scripting languages etc. Doesn't seem to have done any harm :) And you come away with a deeper appreciation of data structures and types. -- Don
2009/7/16 Daniel van den Eijkel
In an ideal world, Haskell would be a perfect first programming language.
But consider: If someone without any programming background learns Haskell as first language, she or he might have big problems using any other language after that. Unlearning what you can do with Haskell is much harder than unlearning imperative thinking. (I had to learn PHP after I was used to write in Haskell, and it was no fun) I don't want to miss the great experience of learning Haskell *after* Scheme (and Scheme after C), and I would not like to deprieve anybody of such an experience. Or what should they have for dessert?
I think the transition from one paradigm to another is always hard, whatever the direction. That's why it's a paradigm.
participants (17)
-
Ahn, Ki Yung -
Andrew Butterfield -
Bulat Ziganshin -
Christopher Done -
Daniel van den Eijkel -
Don Stewart -
Duncan Coutts -
J.N. Oliveira -
Jake McArthur -
Jeremy Shaw -
Joe Fredette -
Matthias Görgens -
Michael Vanier -
Miguel Mitrofanov -
Ross Mellgren -
Simon Peyton-Jones -
Thomas Davie