Burning bridges

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 23 May 2013 11:24,  <amindfv at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

I think it _is_ more of a jump... at least if we want them to
eventually consider Traversable, Functor, etc. in the abstract sense
and avoiding a "Traversable is like a <something>" tutorials; whilst
it might be possible to give people learning Haskell to give them the
intuition that a Functor is a container, how then do you make the jump
to ((->) a) ?


-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com