[Haskell-cafe] Tutorial on Haskell

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

I think its important to cover whats different about Haskell. Things
like laziness are cool, but are harder to convince a strict programmer
that they are useful. Types however are obviously very handy, if you
can focus on why a Haskell program is so obviously correct easily.

> 1) the type system is a great aid to the programmer and programs are
> short. Therefore Haskell is very well suited for the independent
> developer who can't afford huge amounts of code. Open Source has many of
> those.

I'd also at least demonstrate Hoogle, but perhaps I'm biased :-)

> 2) polymorphism is also a great advantage. You can write your program in
> the most general types using e.g. only equality and order, and fine tune
> them later to more specific types which perform better.

I'd also focus on the fact that polymorphism can be inferred, in
things like C++/Ada using polymorphism means littering the code with
hints about the polymorphism.

Thanks

Neil