[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

[Iain Barnett]

On 9 Oct 2008, at 9:33 pm, Andrew Coppin wrote:

>  I think it's just the teaching of the language that needs work,  
> not so much the language itself.


As a newer user myself, I'd agree with this statement. I'd like to  
see far more mundane tasks solved in tutorials. The number of times  
building a parser or generating prime number is used as an example is  
out of proportion to the times you'd use these things[1]. Just  
simple, *really* easy things would be better. Maybe it's just me, but  
if I wanted to learn perl or ruby or python or C# I'm not sure I'd  
ever see a _tutorial_ containing a prime number.

Haskell is can obviously do some really interesting things, but  
constantly having wikipedia open so I can look up whatever  
mathematical doodah has just been mentioned can get draining. Even  
Real World Haskell suffers a bit from this.


Iain


[1] In years of programming (other languages) I've never had to  
generate my own primes or build a compiler or a parser. I may have  
parsed things, but that's different to building an entire parser, if  
you get my drift.

Actually, tell a  lie. I have built a parser, but it's still not  
stuff for a beginner's tutorial IMHO.