[Haskell-cafe] Re: Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Paul Moore wrote:
> Apfelmus, Heinrich wrote:
>>
>> How to learn? The options are, in order of decreasing effectiveness
>>
>>  university course      teacher in person
>>  book                   irc
>>                         mailing list
>>  online tutorial
>>  haskell wiki
>>  haddock documentation
> 
> Reason by analogy from known/similar areas. I think the point here is
> that for Haskell, this is more possible for mathematicians than for
> programmers. And that's an imbalance that may need to be addressed
> (depending on who you want to encourage to learn).
>
> But I agree that reasoning by analogy is not a very good way of
> learning. And I think it's been established that the real issue here
> is the documentation - complete explanations and better
> discoverability[1] are needed.

Yes, agreed. However, I would say that the word "documentation" does not
apply anymore, it's more "subject of study". What I want to say is that
to some extend, Haskell is not only similar to mathematics, it /is/
mathematics, so programmers have to learn mathematics. Traditionally,
this is done in university courses or with books, I'm not sure whether
learning mathematics via internet tutorials on the computer screen works.


Regards,
apfelmus

-- 
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com