[Haskell-cafe] asking for feedback: "Magical Haskell" book in progress

J Ho jho.xray at gmail.com
Sat Nov 4 11:05:51 UTC 2017


Dear Haskellers,

I've systematized my notes from the last 3 years, bit the bullet and
started working on the visual Haskell teaching book that had been my desire
for a long time now :) The goal is to build it on the proper math
foundation of type and category theory to structure concepts and functional
patterns as they apply to real world problems neatly from the start,
without relying on imperative language experience too much, but make it
*visual*, easy to grasp, and not *math-technically* heavy.

Basically, I was thinking *"how do I teach Haskell to my kids?"* and *"how
would people who learned only functional programming from school, without
any imperative exposure, think?"* (I don't think such people exist yet but
I sure would like to speak to those if / when they appear :) - but the goal
is to make it accessible to, hopefully, teens with some reasonable math and
/ or programming background, and also, in the later chapters, make it
useful to adults who better grasp concepts visually (as I do) to have a
neat and systematized Haskell concepts building in their brain.

Here's the direct link to the first chapter: Wizards, Types and Functions
<https://leanpub.com/magicalhaskell/read#leanpub-auto-chapter-1-wizards-types-and-functions>
Here's the book's page on leanpub <https://leanpub.com/magicalhaskell> that
gets gradually updated as usual, and it will of course always stay free.

Would very much appreciate your feedback, suggestions and thoughts! If you
have another 7 minutes to spare and want more context, here's a more
expanded rationale to this approach to teaching haskell - "Haskell Is Not
Programming
<https://superstrings.io/haskell-is-not-programming-3246779f2ef6>" - to
which I received some very valuable feedback (and some understandable
imperative camp critique :)) ) on reddit already, which helped me adjust
the book itself.

Thanks a lot!

Best regards,

- J.
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