[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

[John Goerzen]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 06:39:58PM -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 18:13 -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 02:29:54PM -0700, Jonathan Cast wrote:
> > > > 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?
> > 
> > Uh... yes.  Opening and closing files, command-line parsing, etc --
> > needed by almost every program.  Aside from some very simple
> > stdin-to-stdout filters, it is difficult to imagine a program where
> > you don't need to open a file!
> 
> Again, you need a bigger imagination.  My day job is almost entirely
> DB-centric; code that uses file I/O is very much a special case.

Not saying that it doesn't exist (though of course most databases
still use file I/O at some level, even if abstracted).  Just that it's
very, very common.  I wouldn't support at all teaching database
interactions or network programming before file I/O.

-- John