[Haskell-cafe] RE: Haskell as a first language?

Don Stewart dons at galois.com
Thu Jul 16 16:03:31 EDT 2009


dvde:
> In an ideal world, Haskell would be a perfect first programming language.
>
> But consider: If someone without any programming background learns  
> Haskell as first language, she or he might have big problems using any  
> other language after that. Unlearning what you can do with Haskell is  
> much harder than unlearning imperative thinking. (I had to learn PHP  
> after I was used to write in Haskell, and it was no fun) I don't want to  
> miss the great experience of learning Haskell *after* Scheme (and Scheme  
> after C), and I would not like to deprieve anybody of such an  
> experience. Or what should they have for dessert?

FWIW, thousands of students from UNSW in Sydney learned Haskell as their
first language throughout the 90s, before taking courses in C, Java,
some scripting languages etc.

Doesn't seem to have done any harm :) And you come away with a deeper
appreciation of data structures and types.

-- Don


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