[Haskell-cafe] Re: Tutorial uploaded

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

> Monadic IO is pretty darn cool, sadly that means that many tutorial
> authors are tempted to spend pages upon pages explaining exactly why
> it's cool and how it works, but that is NOT what most people starting
> out with the language need to read.
>
> 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.

Starting with IO in Haskell is like starting LaTeX with rotating text and
making it colorful. Indeed IO _is_ complicated regardless of whether it is
modelled by Monads in Haskell or differently in other languages.
Beginners should start with non-monadic functions in order to later avoid
IO in their functions whereever possible. There are a lot of non-IO
applications a beginner can start with, such as using Hugs or GHCi as a
programmable calculator.