[Haskell-cafe] Doubting Haskell

[Paul Johnson]

Alan Carter wrote:
> I've written up some reflections on my newbie experience together with
> both versions, which might be helpful to people interested in
> popularizing Haskell, at:
>
> http://the-programmers-stone.com/2008/03/04/a-first-haskell-experience/
>   
Thank you for writing this.

On the lack of simple examples showing, for example, file IO: I seem to 
recall a Perl book (maybe it was Edition 1 of the Camel Book) which had 
lots of very short programs each illustrating one typical job.  Also the 
Wiki does have some pages of "worked example" programs.  But I agree, we 
could do better.

I'm surprised you found the significant whitespace difficult.  Yes, the 
formal rules are a bit arcane, but I just read them as "does the Right 
Thing", and it generally works for me.  I didn't know about the 
significance of comments, but then I've never written an outdented comment.

I had a look through your code, and although I admit I haven't done the 
work, I'm sure that there would be ways of factoring out all the 
commonality and thereby reducing the length.

Finally, thanks for that little story about the BBC B.  I had one of 
those, and I always wondered about that heatsink, and the stonking big 
resistor next to it.  They looked out of scale with the rest of the board.

Paul.