The 70's and early 80's were very different in terms of information propagation. I really miss some the journals available back then, because the editors really did their jobs, both in selecting and helping to convey, information. OO did get oversold. The same way that putting it on the internet did at the beginning of this century (I love saying that, now, where's my flying car) but just like many of the good principles of structured programming inform OO, it should be possible to take good OO and apply it functionally. On 1/30/07, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

Hello Steve,

Friday, January 26, 2007, 10:03:09 PM, you wrote:

...

Haskell _is_ hard, although I don't think it's _too_ hard, or I wouldn't ...

...

The audience for programming languages like Haskell is always going to be small, because it appeals to those who want to understand how the TV works,

i don't think so :) imho, we just don't have good _teachers_. in 70's, OOP audience was also small, but it was popularized later and now every student know about polymorphism via inheritance. but most of OOP programmers don't reinvent the wheels, they just use "patterns" described in OOP bestselling books

i have a positive experience of making "complex" concepts easy and available for wide audience ([1]-[5]), [1] was even used to teach students in some college. and i guess that good Haskell books, such as yaht and printed ones, also make it easy to learn Haskell. but we need to gather much more attention to Haskell to make it as "patternized" as structured-programming and OOP. _nowadays_ there is no even one "advanced Haskell" or "Haskell in Real World" book and this means that anyone who want to learn Haskell in deep should study those terrible papers

(well, it's very like higher education in Russia - no one really teaches you at our colleges so you should either learn yourself or die :) but this means that at least whose who still alive, are Real Machos :)

the same apply to Haskell - now the only way to learn it is to learn yourself, so we all definitely are cool mans. once i even got C# job offer only because i know Haskell :)

[1] http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/IO_inside http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/OOP_vs_type_classes http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Modern_array_libraries http://haskell.org/bz/th3.htm http://haskell.org/bz/thdoc.htm

-- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com

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