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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
about I/O disciplines and I should retire to the Tassili-in-Aijer
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-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
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Wrong Audience (Score:2)
What on earth could convince someone writing a programming book for beginning programmers that having them type in examples they can't type in would be a good idea?
I think I see your problem. Programming in Haskell is an academic text. It's written by a professor who is interested in approaching Haskell for students of mathematics. The target audience will understand the use of standard math symbols and their translations into ascii. That's one reason why it's so expensive yet so thin. It's not meant for "beginning programmers".
For a more approachable introduction to Haskell, you should be looking at Real World Haskell. That book is geared towards a more typi
Re: (Score:1)
The University of Melbourne used to teach Haskell as a first language to all the computer science students (they may still, but I'm not there anymore). This worked superbly well. It worked particularly well as a leveller. Those students who'd come into the computer science degree already knowing some other language were neither advantaged by their previous experience or disadvantaged by the bad habits they'd picked up. It gave a nice, sensible int
Re:Wrong Audience (Score:1)
They are starting to teach Haskell as a first language at the University of Edinburgh as well. However, as someone with a background in programming and the Humanities, I have to say that all the Haskell tutorials for "beginners" that I have seen online and off have all failed miseribly. After the first few examples, they tend to fly off into the realms of higher mathematics when really, all I want to do is manipulate texts.
I have started teaching Perl to the Humanities students that I come in contact with (much to the chagrin of the Informatics Department) but Perl does what we want: it manipulates texts easily.
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