3 ms·

> A friend of mine, when showing him the statement 'x = x + 1' was confused; surely, x cannot also equal x+1. Some people say a language like Haskell would be

by retrac 6y ago

> A friend of mine, when showing him the statement 'x = x + 1' was confused; surely, x cannot also equal x+1. Some people say a language like Haskell would be no harder, and maybe even easier, for someone with no previous programming or CS experience, than something like C or Python. Comments like that make me wonder if they're right! (Haskell is a pure functional language. And so has the same reaction as your friend. Variables are immutable. Anything else would be madness.)

richard_todd 6y ago
I guess it depends. Maybe for an adult. I learned the rudiments of Atari BASIC when I was seven and the book explained assignment with cartoon pictures of numbers going into boxes. I don’t remember ever being confused about what it meant. You could just try it (oh, X was 7 and now it’s 8, ok). Similarly, control flow wasn’t hard... just follow whichever line number to GOTO next. You could just play with it until it worked. Would seven-year-old me get very far with recursive functions and IO monads? I really don’t think so. So I’ll always have a soft spot for BASIC and how much fun it was. Maybe python in a Jupyter notebook would be a kind of similar experience for today’s kids? But not Haskell.
- fuball63 6y ago
  It is interesting to try to think all the way back to the struggles of initially learning and wonder if things that seem difficult now (Haskell, which I know barely anything about) might have made more sense then. I often wonder this about TCL, which looks very weird compared to most languages but is really easy to learn if you remember the "12 rules": https://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/Tcl.htm https://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/Tcl.htm
- the_af 6y ago
  > Would seven-year-old me get very far with recursive functions and IO monads? A few years back, there was someone who shared here his experience teaching young kids programming with a simplified/visual Haskell and it was pretty cool. It seems kids without programming preconceptions don't find it all that difficult.

by retrac 6y ago

richard_todd 6y ago

I guess it depends. Maybe for an adult. I learned the rudiments of Atari BASIC when I was seven and the book explained assignment with cartoon pictures of numbers going into boxes. I don’t remember ever being confused about what it meant. You could just try it (oh, X was 7 and now it’s 8, ok). Similarly, control flow wasn’t hard... just follow whichever line number to GOTO next. You could just play with it until it worked. Would seven-year-old me get very far with recursive functions and IO monads? I really don’t think so. So I’ll always have a soft spot for BASIC and how much fun it was. Maybe python in a Jupyter notebook would be a kind of similar experience for today’s kids? But not Haskell.

fuball63 6y ago
It is interesting to try to think all the way back to the struggles of initially learning and wonder if things that seem difficult now (Haskell, which I know barely anything about) might have made more sense then. I often wonder this about TCL, which looks very weird compared to most languages but is really easy to learn if you remember the "12 rules": https://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/Tcl.htm https://tcl.tk/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/Tcl.htm
the_af 6y ago
> Would seven-year-old me get very far with recursive functions and IO monads? A few years back, there was someone who shared here his experience teaching young kids programming with a simplified/visual Haskell and it was pretty cool. It seems kids without programming preconceptions don't find it all that difficult.