Having just now taken delivery of a new technical book - Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - I'm guessing that rumors of their death, as Mark Twain said about

Having just now taken delivery of a new technical book - Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - I'm guessing that rumors of their death, as Mark Twain said about his own, are greatly exaggerated. I bought it on the basis of an online review that would inform this discussion. http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2910 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2910 In the review, Jeremy Bowers discusses his own experience trying to learn Haskell over the past few years from the random bits and pieces that float about the web and how the careful development of ideas in this book "blew what turned out to be my rickety assemblage of concepts apart and replaced them with a solid understanding of what is going on with them, and why." We tend to forget that learning is not the same as carrying around a giant reference book. It's a painstakingly linear process where leaps of understanding happen only when a solid foundation is in place. Books and the linear style of books will always be with us, but to compete with instant search writers must learn to teach.