[Haskell-cafe] Re: Tutorial uploaded

[Bill Wood]

On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 20:07 +0100, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
   . . .
> I'm still looking for a good *practical* tutorial that I could
> recommend to newcomers.
> IO, data types and QuickCheck in the very first chapter, I say! Real
> program examples from the get go, and go into the theory on why this
> has been hard in FP before Haskell (or Monadic IO rather) much much
> later, so as to not scare people away.

I second this motion.  I've been interested in Haskell for some time,
experimented with it several years ago, and then moved on to other
things.  That first time around I saw no comprehensible discussions of
monadic IO (for example, I thought that the fact that when you're in a
monad you can't get out was characteristic of monads in general, not a
peculiarity of IO).  The state of available knowledge for beginners has
clearly improved since I last looked.  I applaud this discussion for
making Haskell more accessible for the newbie.

(Now, if someone would just explain how to get reliable performance
information while jumping through only a bounded number of hoops ... :-)

 -- Bill Wood