[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

[Steve Schafer]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:05:43 -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote:

>No reason not to expose newcomers to Haskell to the thing it does best.

This is precisely why newcomers flounder. Yes, there certainly should be
a "Haskell for experienced Java/C++ programmers : All of the advanced
things you can do more easily than you ever thought possible." But
that's not the way to attract Joe Programmer, who has never had to write
a parser. Joe Programmer needs to be shown how Haskell can solve _his_
problems. That might mean that you need to start with an extremely
non-idiomatic Haskell program, one that has some of the "look and feel"
of what programmers from other languages are comfortable with. And then
transform that program, step-by-step, into something that takes
advantage of Haskell's strengths.

Steve Schafer
Fenestra Technologies Corp.
http://www.fenestra.com/