[Haskell-cafe] Why Haskell is beautiful to the novice

[Benno Fünfstück]

In my opinion, the focus on beauty of the language is simply inappropriate
for a teaching language. An experienced programmer or mathematician might
enjoy transforming a ten line function into a simple one with only one
line, but I think for many students, it won't be so interesting to
transform one working program into a nicer one. Not all people see
simplicity of math as a beautiful thing, for them a simpler formula is not
much more interesting than an equal more complicated one. I believe that
you need some experience to appreciate simplicity and elegance.

Just my two cents,
Benno

Nicola Gigante <nicola.gigante at gmail.com> schrieb am Sa., 29. Aug. 2015
11:49:

>
> Il giorno 28/ago/2015, alle ore 22:17, Alberto G. Corona <
> agocorona at gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> Exactly Mike,
>
> The destruction of pedagogy and innovation by Rationalism:
>
>
> http://nocorrecto.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/the-destruction-of-pedagogy-and.html
>
>
> Wright brothers and Watt were tinkerers, not scientists? Well, maybe they
> were not
> _formally educated theoretical_ scientists. Science is every bit about
> trial-error experimentation
> as is about rational thinking. Science lives on the curiosity of a human
> being that wants to
> know what happens if he does something of which he cannot anticipate the
> effects.
> So 19th and 20th century pioneers were scientists, and good ones indeed.
> That post misses it.
>
> And talking about formalism, I’d like to ask the author of that post who
> he thinks has
> brought humanity from Wright’s flying patch of metal pieces to the Apollo
> 11 mission,
> and from Watt’s experiments to 15nm intel CPUs. Certainly not other
> tinkering, but
> engineers that do hard physics backed by a strong mathematical background.
> It is true that naked formalism is not pedagogical, but even when you
> start learning
> at young age you have to learn that to do new things, _in this century_,
> you have to
> understand how things work.
> Easy tinkering things have already all been discovered, we missed that
> train.
>
> Anyway I’m sorry, this was a bit OT, so I promise to not talk further
> about it.
>
> Bye :)
> Nicola
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