On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Paul Hudak wrote:
Unforunately, the "Gentle Introduction To Haskell" that haskell.org links to is not a very useful introduction.
John and I should probably rename this document, since it really isn't a very gentle intro at all. We should probably also downplay it's prominance on the haskell website. It was written rather quickly many years ago, at a time when there was not a single textbook on Haskell. So it's probably outlived it's purpose, although I do believe that some people still find it useful.
As another point of reference, I decided it was time to learn Haskell recently and this guide is what I started with. I'm familiar with Standard ML and O'Caml, and found the guide to be very easy to read and was a good starting point. I had enough information that I could read other Haskell source and understand what it was trying to do even if I didn't feel comfortable about all the details for writing programs. However, a related issue that has been causing a lot of difficulty is system installation. I'm primarily interested in building stand-alone executables where speed is an important factor, so ghc seemed the best system to work with. I've been unable to get this to work at all on a Windows system. It seems configured to use dynamic libraries but doesn't come with any in the package. I tried building from source, but it requires Happy to build (and that too needed the .dlls). On the Unix side, the installation was much smoother. I installed from source using the FreeBSD port system and everything came together without a hitch (it was a rather lengthy compile process though!). There is a definite lack of "Getting Started" material in the ghc distribution. Documentation on libraries is also rather distributed. Sometimes I need to look in the GHC manual about a library that is included with the distribution, other times I need to look in the Haskell standard library report. And if that fails, look in the Haskell standard language report for information on what is included in the Prelude. Collecting this information together would be a big benefit. I've installed Hugs on the Windows side recently, and it seemed to boot up okay. I haven't tried looking into its documentation to see if things are any different. Overall, I'm very pleased with the lannguage design and am excited about its future. Patrick