New type of ($) operator in GHC 8.0 is problematic

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Hi Takenobu,

> Takenobu Tani <takenobu.hs at gmail.com>:
> 
> Hi Manuel,
> 
> > * Introduce the concept of overloading right away. People get that easily,
> > because they use overloaded arithmetic functions in math, too.
> > (Num and Show are the typical classes to explain it at.)
> > As an example, see how we do that in the first chapter of our new Haskell
> > tutorial: http://learn.hfm.io/first_steps.html <http://learn.hfm.io/first_steps.html>
> 
> This is straightforward and elegance tutorial! I like this.

You are very kind. Thank you.

> As you know, I'll share one point to list.
> 
> It's better to assume that "beginners are not only students in universities".
> Beginners are also engineers, hobbyist, teenager, your friends and your family.
> Someone of them will touch to Haskell alone and learn with self study
> in a little bit of knowledge.
> 
> If they feel complex at first impression in their 1st week,
> they would go back before they realize beauty of Haskell.
> 
> Sometimes, I’m worried about it.

I do worry about the same thing. The Haskell ecosystem is very much geared towards experts and tinkerers (with laudable exceptions, such as, for example, the great work done by Chris Allen). Being an expert and tinkerer that didn’t worry me too much, but lately I am trying to make functional programming and Haskell accessible to a broader audience and it is an uphill battle. Even many professional software developers are put off even trying to install the toolchain. It is not that they wouldn’t been able to do it if they wanted. They just can’t be bothered because they are not convinced of the value of doing so at this stage — exactly as you are saying.

We should make it easier to get started, not harder.

Manuel

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