[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

Jonathan Cast jonathanccast at fastmail.fm
Fri Oct 10 14:05:43 EDT 2008


On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 19:08 +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
> 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.

In Haskell it is.

Parsec makes recursive descent parsers as easy to use in Haskell as
regexps are in Perl.  No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to
the thing it does best.

jcc




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