[Haskell-cafe] Re: Tutorial uploaded

[Daniel Carrera]

Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> Well, I certainly disagree there.
> I'm not advocating going into a full-blown explanation of monads, just
> enough to actually be able to write a real stand-alone program after
> the first chapter. They only need to know that do-notation is for
> sequencing computations, and (<-) is for binding a name to the result
> of a computation. That's it!

As a newbie... I agree that a newbie should be able to write this fairly 
early on:

main = do
        x <- getLine()
        putStrLn ("The answer is " ++ show(fib(read(x))))


Now, you just said "do-notation is for sequencing computations". Would 
it be fair to say that do-blocks are imperative blocks in an otherwise 
functional program?

> You could spend the next ten chapters with coding examples that are
> not very IO-heavy, and lead with a good example of doing as much as
> possible in the pure world (as well as pointing out every now and then
> whenever a particularly good "IO-separtion" was achieved - to
> emphasize that it's good practice).
> 
> When someone who has programmed before learns Haskell and gets the
> impression that IO is beeing left for later because it's "hard" they
> might think "bah, what a rubbish language, IO in Visual Basic isn't
> hard at all!".

I would agree with both paragraphs. Show basic IO and show that there's 
no need for complex IO because all the logic should be functional.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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