[Haskell-cafe] Re: Tutorial uploaded

[John Meacham]

<noise>
The truth is, Haskell friggen rocks at IO compared to imperative
languages. We are all spoiled and see IO in haskell as ugly because we
have been exposed to the pure functional goodness of the rest of
haskell. but teaching haskell as a better impertive language than
imperative ones from the getgo seems like a very good approach for
bringing people over. Just the idea that you can write things like mapM
and replicateM is enough to blow the mind of many impertive programmers.
They don't need to be forced to learn the pure functional side, they
will eventually learn to do so on their own because it is so darn nice. 

You can't not start with IO for people who already know how to program,
if you are teaching someone programming for the very first time then
starting with the pure functional side is fine. But for people that
already know how to program, they are constantly thinking of everything
else they have written and how they might do it in the language they are
currently learning comparing and contrasting in their head. They need to
have the tools to replicate what they have done with other languages
right away, they don't want to know how to do the examples given in the
book except insofar as they let them understand how to write the
examples wiggling around in their head.

</noise>

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈