ANNOUNCE: Draft TOC of Haskell in a Nutshell

Sebastian Schulz schulzs@uni-freiburg.de
Wed, 10 Jan 2001 20:53:51 +0000


"Benjamin L. Russell" wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 9 Jan 2001 09:00:27 +0100 (MET)
>  Johannes Waldmann <joe@isun.informatik.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:
> >
> > This could be driven to the extreme: not only hide the
> > word "monad",
> > but also "functional". The title would be "Imperative
> > programming in Haskell"
> > (as  S. Peyton Jones says in Tackling the Awkward Squad:
> > "Haskell is the world's finest imperative programming
> > language").
> 
> Couldn't this choice potentially backfire, though?  For example, many people choose Java over C because they prefer OO to straight imperative programming, which they see at The Old Way.
> 
> If I went to a bookstore and saw one book entitled, "Imperative Programming in Haskell," and another entitled, "OO Programming in Java," I wouldn't buy the Haskell book, especially if had already had a bad experience with imperative programming in C.
> 
> How about, "The Post-OO Age:  Haskell:  Back to the Future in Imperative Programming"?

I didn`t follow this discussion very closely, but:
Hey! What`s so evil in the word "functional"??!

Haskell was the first language I learned (to love;-) and for me it's
more difficult to think imperative (e.g. when I have to do some homework
in Java). 
In that bookstore, I would buy a book "Functional Programming in Java"
:)  .
But serious, I don`t think that it is good to hide the fact that Haskell
is a functional Language. Nobody will realize how comfortable and
elegant the functional way is, when he is still thinking: "Wow, how
complicate to program imperative with this functional syntax".



regards 
Sebastian