Burning bridges

[amindfv at gmail.com]

El May 22, 2013, a las 9:25 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> escribió:

> On 23 May 2013 11:06, Casey McCann <cam at uptoisomorphism.net> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I think you missed my point... I'm not saying it's just because of the
> course I'm tutoring, but that I disagree with the contention of
> "people learning Haskell will pick this up relatively easier so we
> should just dismiss anything about not generalising because it will
> make it easier for new people".
> 
> Also, not all people that learn Haskell are self-motivated in doing
> so, and thus won't take in the extra mental effort to understand how
> type-classes work right from the beginning.
> 

If you want to avoid throwing people right into typeclasses, I could imagine teaching them:
 - To write map/fold/filter themselves, with simple [a] types
 - By giving them a small "module CS101 where" file, with monomorphic types of all our familiar friends, and then have them import with "import qualified CS101" and call "CS101.map" etc

Tom