[Haskell-cafe] First steps in Haskell

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Daniel is right, by definition.  He is a new user.  He had difficulty.
That much is incontrovertible.

While he may seem unusual, perhaps he is only unusual in that he's told
us about his experience rather than trying Perl instead.  For which,
much thanks, Daniel!

In any case, I think it'd be great if he, or anyone else, started a Wiki
page on "very first steps in Haskell", along the lines he suggests.
Maybe one exists already?  Once it does, it'd be good to point to it
from haskell.org.

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org
[mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Wolfgang Jeltsch
| Sent: 19 December 2005 09:50
| To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
| Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] First steps in Haskell
| 
| Am Sonntag, 18. Dezember 2005 17:25 schrieb Daniel Carrera:
| > [...]
| 
| > This is a real problem for Haskell. I expect that a lot of people
try
| > Haskell and give up because they can't even write the simplest
function.
| 
| Hello Daniel,
| 
| honestly, I have to say that during my years with Haskell, this seems
to be
| the first time that I see somebody trying to enter a Haskell program
via the
| command line of an interactive environment.  So I suppose that it's
not "a
| lot of people" who experience the problems you do.
| 
| > It's hard not to be put off by this. I love the theory behind
Haskell,
| > but the practice of it seems to be a real problem.
| 
| Did you have a look at the Hugs or GHCi documentation?  I'm very sure,
it will
| tell you that what you may enter at the command line are (merely)
expressions
| to evaluate and special commands like :t for displaying the type of an
| expression, and that the Haskell declarations (normally) have to be
read from
| a file.
| 
| > I hope someone will show me how to make this program work. Even
better,
| > I hope someone will fix the compilers and interpreters if they need
| > fixing, or fix the documentation if that's what needs fixing.
| 
| I suppose that neither the compilers and interpreters nor the
documentation
| need(s) fixing, although I might be wrong with the documentation.
| 
| > Best,
| > Daniel.
| 
| Best wishes,
| Wolfgang
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