[Haskell-cafe] On the verge of ... giving up!

[Felipe Lessa]

On 10/17/07, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> it. And it frustrates the hell out of me that 100% of the human
> population consider Haskell to be an irrelevant joke language. So I
> basically have this uncontrollably awsome thing in front of me that I
> spend all my time and energy interacting with... and nobody to talk to
> about it. This mailing list is the only place I know of that is
> inhabited by people who actually think Haskell is something worth
> persuing. However, apparently even here my enthusiasm is misplaced.

I feel this way as well, specially because one of the teachers here
tell all students that Haskell is the slowest thing ever by comparing
Fibonacci sequence implementations between C and Haskell *using Hugs*.
Unfortunately he doesn't want to now GHC or anything else that changes
his mind.

But it's easy to impress your friends. One of these days I used Parsec
to solve in 5 minutes a problem most people had spent at least a
couple of hours. And besides having one tenth of SLOC, it gave nice
error messages. They're getting interested, and some of them already
said that they'll learn it on the next summer (we're on the Southern
Hemisphere =). Someday we'll be using "monads" on e-mails.

Maybe this is not the best way to present a language, but in a
university where most people think that Java is the answer for every
question, it's the way I found to motivate them.

Oh, and I'm an undergraduate. Do I get free lambdas?  :)

PS: Does anybody have slides for teaching imperative programmers how
to start feeling Haskell?  I would like to give them a sort of
minicourse for getting started.

-- 
Felipe.