On 21 Jun 2013, at 10:51, Nikita Volkov wrote:
Since there's been so many suggestions concerning radically changing the Prelude recently, I'd like to start a poll on a subject.
I know that "map" is limited to lists for the beginners, but then we're already making a lot of unbeginnerish changes to Prelude. Also it's not a monad transformer, but just a functor - how can a person learn Haskell without understanding what a Functor is?
!!!! No one needs to know what a functor is in order to learn Haskell. No one needs to know any category theory ideas to learn Haskell. Haskell is a very good vehicle to introduce such category-theoretic concepts, and as someone learns Haskell, learning about Haskell classes(*) such as Functor, etc, is very important and useful. My main reason for this sudden and abrupt response is that I would be worried if any Prelude re-design was predicated on the idea that Haskell beginners need to understand Functors - they don't, but hopefully they will learn... (*) as distinct from learning about the category theoretic notion of functor.
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