[Haskell-cafe] Why Haskell is beautiful to the novice

[Alberto G. Corona]

My impression is that a programming is a tool for solving problems and the
perceived beauty of a tool is a mix of many impression: One is the personal
level of mastering of the tool, but also what the tool promises to achieve
when you reach the next levels. Otherwise when you master it completely, it
looses his interest.

 This second part is what makes haskell attractive: it has no limits

2015-08-27 23:08 GMT+02:00 Olaf Klinke <olf at aatal-apotheke.de>:

> Dear cafe,
>
> please correct me if questions like this should not go via this mailing
> list.
> Presumably everyone on this list agrees that Haskell stands out as a
> beautiful and pleasant language to have. The recent nitpicking and
> real-world problems like cabal hell don't change that. However, statements
> supporting Haskell's beauty usually involve: "In Haskell it is so much
> clearer/easier/faster to ... than in another language." That is, the beauty
> of Haskell presents itself to those who can compare it to other imperative
> or not strongly typed languages that one learned before Haskell.
> My question is, for what reason should anyone not acquainted with any
> programming language find Haskell beautiful? Maybe it does not look
> beautiful at all to the novice. The novice can not draw on the comparison,
> unless he takes the effort to learn more than one language in parallel. The
> novice likely also does not have the mathematical background to see the
> beautiful correspondence between the language and its semantics. (My reason
> to love FP is because it is executable domain theory.) One might argue that
> it is not the language itself that is beautiful, but rather the concepts
> (data structures, algorithms, recursion) and Haskell does a great job to
> preserve their beauty into the implementation. Do you agree?
>
> Disclaimer: I am about to start teaching a first course in computer
> science in secondary school. I can teach whatever I want, since this is the
> first CS course the school ever had. I want to teach beautiful things. I
> love functional programming. I need not start teaching programming right
> away. But I am reluctant to expose the pupils to something whose beauty
> escapes them completely.
>
> -- Olaf
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>



-- 
Alberto.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20150828/0630e9d1/attachment.html>