[Haskell-cafe] Re: Tutorial uploaded

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Robin Green wrote:

> Henning Thielemann wrote:
> > Starting with IO in Haskell is like starting LaTeX with rotating text and
> > making it colorful.
>
> Not at all!
>
> > Indeed IO _is_ complicated regardless of whether it is
> > modelled by Monads in Haskell or differently in other languages.
>
> Rubbish!
>
> 10 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME?"
> 20 INPUT NAME
>
> IO isn't complicated in BASIC.

IO is always complicated: It means sending messages, follow redirections,
updating contents of windows, writing to disks etc. Nevertheless it may be
easily accessible in some languages like BASIC. But it is important to
separate IO from computations, also in languages where IO is easily
accessible. Usually students start writing programs with much user
interaction and it is hard to convince them of the advantages of
programming interfaces. So I prefer starting a tutorial without IO,
interaction in GHCi and Hugs should be enough for the beginning.