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

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

I wonder if we aren't all missing something.

In another mailing list I have been trying to explain
to someone how to write a JSON parser in a functional
language.

If anything unexpected comes up, like an error message,
he freezes, then calls the mailing list for help.
The error messages will say things like
   foobar is unused
   fooBar is undefined
and he'll sit there baffled.

I know a bright statistician who *hated* programming
because of the compiler error messages (for a fairly
simple imperative language, too).

For *some* novice programmers, the quality of the error
messages may be more important than almost anything else,
which means that for *them*, the language as such may be
almost irrelevant, except indirectly as it makes it easier
or harder to generate really clear error messages.