[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

[Jonathan Cast]

On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 19:27 +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
> On 10 Oct 2008, at 7:05 pm, Jonathan Cast wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 19:08 +0100, Iain Barnett wrote:
> 
> > 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
> >
> >
> 
> Regex tends to come after things like basic I/O, even in Perl.

Why would I want to do I/O, when I don't know how to do anything
interesting with the input yet, or how to generate interesting output?
I think the `I/O comes first' attitude is *precisely* the difference
between mainstream programmers and Haskellers.  The goal should be to
create more Haskellers, not just more people whose code happens to be
accepted by GHC.

> I've  
> got a Haskell book here (Hutton, 170 pages) that doesn't even mention  
> how to open a file!

That short, and you expect minor features like that (that not every
program even needs) to be squeezed in?

jcc