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

[Alexey Muranov]

I would like to mention, maybe somewhat off-topick, that the question "what 
to teach first, functional or imperative programming?" looks to me a bit 
similar to the question "what to teach first, lambda calculus or Turing 
machine?".

While lambda calculus looks like a deep and exciting rewriting system, with 
interesting algebraic and combinatorial properties and a simpler and more 
satisfying definition than that of a Turing machine, it might be not the 
best model of algorithm to introduce kids to for the first time. At the 
very least, it would be necessary to prove confluence or to restrict to one 
evaluation strategy (so no laziness, or the other way around). Justifying 
Church-Turing thesis with lambda calculus instead of Turing machine is 
intuitively difficult, if at all possible. I have heard from a colleague 
(but do not have a reference for this, so not quite sure) that it was the 
Turing's solution of Hilbert's decision problem, and not the Church's, that 
was fully accepted by the community.

Alexey.
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