[OT] Teaching Haskell in High School (fwd)

[Rex Page]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, David Bergman wrote:

> Rex 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
> 
> I have always had that same experience with any (more or less)
> declarative language. BUT, as soon as the "hackers" (well, maybe not VB
> programmers, they are kind of doomed...) have passed the initial
> frustration, and acquired the "new way of thinking", they actually
> perform much better than the real beginners.
> 
> /David

Yes, I've seen the same thing with some of the people who come in with
experience. Some are lost, but a few of them really embrace the
expressiveness of a language like Haskell.

Rex



>  
>  
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 03:03:03 +0100
> > From: Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang@jeltsch.net>
> > To: The Haskell Mailing List <haskell@haskell.org>
> > Subject: Re: [OT] Teaching Haskell in High School
> > 
> > On Tuesday, 2003-02-04, 01:01, CET, Hal Daume wrote:
> > > [...]
> > 
> > > However, I'm also well aware that Haskell is very difficult 
> > to learn 
> > > (and, I'd imagine, to teach).
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I wouldn't claim that Haskell is very difficult to learn. I 
> > think, people 
> > often have problems with learning Haskell because they know 
> > imperative 
> > programming and try to apply their imperative thinking to 
> > programming in 
> > Haskell.
> > 
> > Some months ago, a first year student told me that she liked 
> > Haskell very much 
> > and that she didn't find it very difficult. I asked her if 
> > she had had 
> > experiences with other programming languages before learning 
> > Haskell. She 
> > answered: "No."
> > 
> > > [...]
> > 
> > Wolfgang
> > _______________________________________________
> > Haskell mailing list
> > Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Haskell mailing list
> > Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
> > 
> 
>