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

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2016-02-18 at 04:02:24 +0100, Eric Seidel wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2016, at 08:09, Christopher Allen wrote:
>> I have tried a beginner's Prelude with people. I don't have a lot of data
>> because it was clearly a failure early on so I bailed them out into the
>> usual thing. It's just not worth it and it deprives them of the
>> preparedness to go write real Haskell code. That's not something I'm
>> willing to give up just so I can teach _less_.
>
> Chris, have you written about your experiences teaching with a
> beginner's Prelude? I'd be quite interested to read about it, as (1) it
> seems like a natural thing to do and (2) the Racket folks seem to have
> had good success with their staged teaching languages.
>
> In particular, I'm curious if your experience is in the context of
> teaching people with no experience programming at all, vs programming
> experience but no Haskell (or generally FP) experience. The Racket "How
> to Design Programs" curriculum seems very much geared towards absolute
> beginners, and that could be a relevant distinction.

Btw, IMHO it's also interesting to distinguish between teaching
functional programming vs teaching Haskell.

I've noticed that in the former case, instructors would often prefer a
radically slimmed down standard-library and conceal some of Haskell's
language features not pertinent to their FP curriculum (e.g. typeclasses
or record syntax).

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