[OT] Teaching Haskell in High School (fwd)

[John Hughes]

On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Rex Page wrote:

> This matches my experience, too. When I've taught Haskell to first
> year college students, there have always been some hard core hackers
> who've been at it in C or VB or Perl or something like that for
> years, and they rarely take kindly to Haskell. The ones without any
> programming background do better.
>
> I think Haskell would be great for a high school math class. They
> could learn some logic and induction along with it, and get a few
> proofs back into the high school math curriculum.
>
> Rex Page

Actually, this doesn't match my experience. I teach first years too, and I
always have some hard core hackers. In my experience, they have the
advantage that they already understand notions such as a formal syntax and
an algorithm, as opposed to expecting that the computer will somehow
"know what they mean". They also have something concrete to compare
Haskell against ... which often leads them to become real Haskell
enthusiasts! But then again, my course emphasises real programming and
real-world problem solving, at the expense of logic and induction.

John Hughes