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it's inappropriate to make ad hominem attacks here, please refrain from doing so. I didn't name any shortcomings in Haskell, I gave a general rule of thumb. H

it's inappropriate to make ad hominem attacks here, please refrain from doing so. I didn't name any shortcomings in Haskell, I gave a general rule of thumb. However, as you yourself demonstrate dramatically, by using an ad hominem and saying "spreading irational FUD", if I did have a clear and rational understanding of why your prefered technology has underlying shortcomings as a trade-off, which learners need to deal with, then I certainly would keep that information to myself. Who wants to be skewered by a community? For this reason, you will never see clear explanations in that format. Instead, people who have attained that information for themselves will simply keep it to themselves - they won't teach it at all. They will teach it without reference to alternatives or to the strength of trade-offs that have been made. That's why it will seem like a case of "poor pedagogy". But it never is that. It's a case of people in the know politely avoiding teaching it. Please note that this is just my personal opinion, you can disagree with it. I didn't mean to start a debate.

omginternets 11y ago
His point is that your argument is so difficult to follow that it looks ad hoc. That, in combination with your throwaway account, raises red flags for trolling. Ad hominem attacks are informal fallacies, granted, but they're still sometimes relevant.
mbrock 11y ago
You were claiming, with extremely vague reasoning from a throwaway account, that any technology with a reputation of bad pedagogy—obviously referring to Haskell—"fundamentally sucks." Ad hominem fallacy is when you use a character attack but pretend it is a logical argument. I don't claim to make a logical argument—there's nothing logical in your comment to respond to. If you don't want to start debates on the internet, try not telling people that the technology of their choice "fundamentally sucks."
- throwawayignt 11y ago
  Haskell doesn't have a reputation of bad pedagogy per se. My only point was what anyone's reaction should be when their personal impression is "bad pedagogy", in any area of software. It means that something is missing. The idea that I'm "obviously referring to Haskell" and attacking me for it is beneath a response. By the way this thread is an excellent example of why if I did have clear arguments for limitations baked into technology xyz, I certainly wouldn't share them: leaving learners in the difficult position of being presented difficul material/approaches, without a context, by those who understand it but keep mum about any limitations or difficulties. (An example would be the syntax for standard library container operations in C++ (stl things), like with vectors. Nobody is going to explain that this syntax is so much uglier than higher-level vector/array syntax due to history, because the minute they did it would become obvious that there should be a CoffeeScript-like intermediate syntax parser that turns easy syntax into C++. Instead, it's presented without any such context, and nobody fixed the fact that this is harder to learn, harder to parse or debug, and more error-prone, than higher-level interpreted languages. It's just silently accepted without reference to this being a historical design trade-off. I'm not objecting to it, but if something seems to be described circuitously or not being taught very well, then you're probably not being told the whole story. There is a good and specific rason why.)
  - mbrock 11y ago
    I apologize for misinterpreting. Note that just as your original comment was murky and seemingly accusatory, so was my original reply to you—because I was parodying you. You talked about unspecified things fundamentally and secretly sucking... so I said that you might be fundamentally and secretly trolling... who knows if any of these claims are true? They're both murky, vague, and somewhat paranoid. The more straightforward argument you're producing now seems interesting, and I agree to some extent. I'll happily admit that Haskell—just like every single language—has historical warts and problems. Some of them are being addressed by the community, with some of them the community is stuck in arguing, etc. C++ has always been firmly committed to backwards compatibility, which is one reason it is such a successful industrial language. Haskell has some of that too, and incompatible changes made to the core language are rare and always met with suspicion. However, I don't think the Haskell community is especially dogmatic about the perfection of their own language. If anything, people are constantly discussing ways to make it better.
  - tome 11y ago
    > The idea that I'm "obviously referring to Haskell" and attacking me for it is beneath a response. You were replying directly to a post that claimed "the haskell community is, on the whole, truly awful at pedagogy" so it's easy to see how mbrock mistakenly concluded that, when you said "in some fundamental, underlying way, it sucks", you were referring to Haskell (when in fact you meant something entirely different).

omginternets 11y ago

His point is that your argument is so difficult to follow that it looks ad hoc. That, in combination with your throwaway account, raises red flags for trolling. Ad hominem attacks are informal fallacies, granted, but they're still sometimes relevant.

mbrock 11y ago

You were claiming, with extremely vague reasoning from a throwaway account, that any technology with a reputation of bad pedagogy—obviously referring to Haskell—"fundamentally sucks." Ad hominem fallacy is when you use a character attack but pretend it is a logical argument. I don't claim to make a logical argument—there's nothing logical in your comment to respond to. If you don't want to start debates on the internet, try not telling people that the technology of their choice "fundamentally sucks."

throwawayignt 11y ago
Haskell doesn't have a reputation of bad pedagogy per se. My only point was what anyone's reaction should be when their personal impression is "bad pedagogy", in any area of software. It means that something is missing. The idea that I'm "obviously referring to Haskell" and attacking me for it is beneath a response. By the way this thread is an excellent example of why if I did have clear arguments for limitations baked into technology xyz, I certainly wouldn't share them: leaving learners in the difficult position of being presented difficul material/approaches, without a context, by those who understand it but keep mum about any limitations or difficulties. (An example would be the syntax for standard library container operations in C++ (stl things), like with vectors. Nobody is going to explain that this syntax is so much uglier than higher-level vector/array syntax due to history, because the minute they did it would become obvious that there should be a CoffeeScript-like intermediate syntax parser that turns easy syntax into C++. Instead, it's presented without any such context, and nobody fixed the fact that this is harder to learn, harder to parse or debug, and more error-prone, than higher-level interpreted languages. It's just silently accepted without reference to this being a historical design trade-off. I'm not objecting to it, but if something seems to be described circuitously or not being taught very well, then you're probably not being told the whole story. There is a good and specific rason why.)
- mbrock 11y ago
  I apologize for misinterpreting. Note that just as your original comment was murky and seemingly accusatory, so was my original reply to you—because I was parodying you. You talked about unspecified things fundamentally and secretly sucking... so I said that you might be fundamentally and secretly trolling... who knows if any of these claims are true? They're both murky, vague, and somewhat paranoid. The more straightforward argument you're producing now seems interesting, and I agree to some extent. I'll happily admit that Haskell—just like every single language—has historical warts and problems. Some of them are being addressed by the community, with some of them the community is stuck in arguing, etc. C++ has always been firmly committed to backwards compatibility, which is one reason it is such a successful industrial language. Haskell has some of that too, and incompatible changes made to the core language are rare and always met with suspicion. However, I don't think the Haskell community is especially dogmatic about the perfection of their own language. If anything, people are constantly discussing ways to make it better.
- tome 11y ago
  > The idea that I'm "obviously referring to Haskell" and attacking me for it is beneath a response. You were replying directly to a post that claimed "the haskell community is, on the whole, truly awful at pedagogy" so it's easy to see how mbrock mistakenly concluded that, when you said "in some fundamental, underlying way, it sucks", you were referring to Haskell (when in fact you meant something entirely different).