[Haskell-cafe] Re: Tutorial uploaded

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello John,

Thursday, December 22, 2005, 3:48:37 AM, you wrote:

JM> You can't not start with IO for people who already know how to program,
JM> if you are teaching someone programming for the very first time then
JM> starting with the pure functional side is fine. But for people that
JM> already know how to program, they are constantly thinking of everything
JM> else they have written and how they might do it in the language they are
JM> currently learning comparing and contrasting in their head. They need to
JM> have the tools to replicate what they have done with other languages
JM> right away, they don't want to know how to do the examples given in the
JM> book except insofar as they let them understand how to write the
JM> examples wiggling around in their head.

yes, it's just about me :)  first i time i tried to learn Haskell
(afair, it was advertized on bzip2 page), i decided that it need to
write everything as a pure function and found monad concept very
complex (afair, "gentle introduction" emphasizes that monads are very
complex things!). next time i tried to learn Haskell, my main question
was "is it possible to use imperative style of controlling program
action?". i recognized functional power of language and it was the
last barrier to really use it

so, i think, it is needed to "reassure" imperative programmers at
first pages by demonstrating techiques of imperative programming,
including conditional execution and IORef/MArray and only after that
present more convenient alternatives. at least for my imperative feel,
conditional execution, cycles, modifiable variables and arrays
together form enough basis to implement any algorithm


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:bulatz at HotPOP.com