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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • Wow. The anecdotes I've read have all seemed to point to Haskell's being hard as a first language, so I'm surprised the students chose it freely for random coding tasks. What kind of Haskell environment did they use? What other languages had they seen (and in what order)? Did you get a sense for what portion of the students "got it"?

    /s

    • Re:Haskell?! (Score:2, Informative)

      by ambs (3914)
      Hi! I'm the Alberto guy! :-)

      Here in the university, programming languages are presented in this order (this will change a little sooner or later): Haskell, C, Prolog, Java Other languages are used but under other subjects: Perl for system admins and natural language processing, Visual Basic (yuck!) for some database applications, and so on.

      Regarding the use of Haskell and not another language, teachers noticed that students which already program (C, for example) have more dificulties to learn Haskell th

      • Regarding the use of Haskell and not another language, teachers noticed that students which already program (C, for example) have more dificulties to learn Haskell than the virgin ones
        This makes sense to me. I started out with Scheme, then C++, and it took me awhile to be able to write idiomatic Haskell. I'm still not comfortable in Prolog, but since I don't really have a use for it, that's not such a big deal.

        I'm impressed by the language variety there, btw. Where I am now (UCSD), they throw the students right into Java, then have them pick up a bit of C/asm for compilers and OS. While the PL course here is sometimes taught in Haskell, it's optional, and most students don't take it (a shame). Most of the upper-level undergrads I've dealt with don't have a strong grasp of programming language semantics. So I find it surprising that a curriculum showing all three major programming paradigms succeeds (if it does) with more than a small minority of the students. Haskell's never struck me as particularly forgiving, either -- some of the type errors it gives are (to me) less than transparent.

        /s

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