[Haskell-cafe] Learning about Programming Languages (specifically Haskell)

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi Samuel

I'm not sure Haskell is an ideal language for school age teaching,
DrScheme seems a more obvious choice.

Paul Hudak made a good case for Haskell as a learning language with
his School of Expression book, but if you weren't directly following
that book, I think it would be hard to make the teaching fun (which
I'd expect to be the major battle for teaching kids). Obvious problems
- cryptic error messages, hiatus from graphics / multimedia, lack of a
text book (if not using School of Expression)...

That said, there were some nice slides from John Peterson about
teaching summer school mathematics where Haskell was used 'under the
hood' to create music or draw pictures. The students certainly weren't
exposed to full Haskell - just a very small core that was largely
familiar from maths, plus specific functions to compose pictures /
music.

Best wishes

Stephen