Burning bridges

[amindfv at gmail.com]

El May 22, 2013, a las 9:06 PM, Casey McCann <cam at uptoisomorphism.net> escribió:

> On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
> <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 23 May 2013 07:32, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com> wrote:
>>> -20 for generalising the Prelude
>>> +1 for removals from the Prelude
>>> -1 for adding monomorphic stuff
>>> +1000 for doing nothing
>>> 
>>> You are all nuts. :-)
>> 
>> I don't know if I'd go quite _that_ for as Malcolm for the weightings
>> for the different proposals...
>> 
>> But I was speaking with a few other tutors of an introductory
>> CS/programming course that uses Haskell (note: it's teaching
>> programming with Haskell, not teaching Haskell per se: for example,
>> all pattern matchings must be done with case statements as the
>> lecturer considers top-level pattern matching a Haskell-specific
>> quirk) about these proposals...
> 
> So in other words, your contention is that the design of the core
> library of Haskell should be driven by the needs of an introductory
> programming course, which is not even attempting to teach Haskell
> specifically, aimed at students who can't even figure out how tab
> characters work? That's marvelous.
> 
> - C.

I'd phrase it more nicely than that, but I agree with the point that you could still teach the course with haskell.

Specifically, it seems like not much of a jump in abstraction to go from

[Int] to
[a] to
List a to
(Traversable f) => f a to
(Functor f) => f a

Tom