[Haskell-cafe] Why Perl is more learnable than Haskell

kynn kynnjo at gmail.com
Wed Apr 11 23:10:56 EDT 2007



riccardo cagnasso wrote:
> 
> My opinion is that "learnin haskell is difficult" is just for the fact
> that
> when you learn programming, you probably begin with C / C++ or some other
> procedural/OO programming language...
> 

Actually, my first language was Scheme; I loved it, and I aced the class,
but that was many years ago, and I never had to code "real world"
applications with Scheme.  My problems with Haskell are not conceptual, but
rather pragmatic.  I have not been able to find enough support in Haskell
for everyday tasks (e.g. read a stream from a socket; parse it into a simple
data structure; process the data in the structure; print out the results to
a socket; etc.), and unless I want to code large low-level libraries from
scratch just to get conceptually simple tasks done, I can't afford to use
Haskell (any more than I could afford to use barebones C, for that matter).

And even though my interest in learning Haskell is not a "pragmatic" one
(I'm quite productive with the tools I know; I just want to learn a new way
to program, by way of intellectual curiosity), my life is such that, unless
I can immediately make use of the language I'm attempting to learn, it just
won't stick!  The language needs it to be useful not because I need a tool,
but because unless it is useful my brain just won't absorb it!

kj

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