[Haskell-cafe] What I wish someone had told me...

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

John Lato wrote:
> Are you advocating introducing existential types to beginning
> Haskellers?  I think something with the scary name "existential
> quantification" would greatly increase the head'splodin' on the
> learnin' slope.

OOP(*) advocates introducing existential types to beginning programmers. 
Although it uses an easy name "object" and not a technical name 
"existential", the easy-name honeymoon ends in a few minutes as soon as 
the teacher demonstrates or the students discover the tricky behaviour 
and semantics. It results in the same confusion and head explosion. The 
learning curve is the same struggle struggle explosion struggle then click.

(*)Object Obfuscation Pomposity

The broken analogy between OOP interfaces and Haskell/Isabell type 
classes is there because some people insist that all languages should be 
like mainstream languages. You have heard it, even from reputable 
leaders and pioneers: "if you know one language, picking up others 
should be easy, they just differ in syntax".