[Haskell-cafe] Interesting new user perspective

Jonathan Cast jonathanccast at fastmail.fm
Sun Oct 12 22:41:40 EDT 2008


On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 21:34 -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> 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.

I'm not advocating that.  But I do think demanding the teaching of *any*
interface issues before you've shown enough Haskell to write interesting
logic to tie to the interface is backwards.

jcc




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