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My brother (a Haskell programmer) and I (a teacher of high school CS) have talked about this often. He's postulated that teaching Haskell to kids with no progra

My brother (a Haskell programmer) and I (a teacher of high school CS) have talked about this often. He's postulated that teaching Haskell to kids with no programming experience would be an interesting experiment. Their lack of preconceptions regarding programming might make Haskell much easier for them to pick up, than it would for a student with experience in another language. What would be more interesting however, would be to teach a student Haskell first, and then introduce a language such as Python. Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop?

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
> Their lack of preconceptions regarding programming might make Haskell much easier for them to pick up, than it would for a student with experience in another language. Or traumatize them forever away from the field of programming. > Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop? I would love to know the answer to this, regardless of my own biases. But Haskell really does require discipline to use, and the kids would probably appreciate the more lax nature of Python.
- MarcScott 12y ago
  It's an experiment that I'll never run. CS exam requirements are geared towards OO languages. Students have to analyse and write pseudocode using traditional programming constructs.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    What are CS exam requirements? Are they standardized? I went through the American system, and never had any of my tests biased to OOP (except of course, a Smalltalk chapter in one PL zoo class). Object thinking is easier to wrap one's head around than mathematical formal thinking, but that's just because the former uses the brain's innate linguistic hardware (we learn to talk without much effort) while the latter requires training and practice.
    - gamegoblin 12y ago
      Perhaps the commenter is referring to the AP computer science class, which I think is pretty OO based? In my experience at least.
    - MarcScott 12y ago
      I teach in the UK. Here's the spec for one of our GCSE courses. http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/ict-and-computer-science/gcse/computer-science-4512 http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/ict-and-computer-science/gcse...
    - ucarion 12y ago
      The current AP standards focus a lot on OOP. Here's the latest course description: http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-computer-science-a-course-description-2014.pdf http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-comp...
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    In which countries? Just had a look at the curriculum of the Portuguese university I graduated from, a couple of decades ago and they still teach OOP, FP, LP across multiple languages.
  - mpweiher 12y ago
    At the TU-Berlin, our intro courses were held in FP languages, and we were indoctrinated as to the incomparable superiority of the approach...and could see for ourselves how the reality diverged from the hype. That was a good 20 years ago, but I just ran into a current student who told me that's still the case, and they still hate it as much as we did.
    - 59nadir 12y ago
      Seems like your university is doing it wrong. While I do believe that the principles used in FP languages are vastly superior I don't think this is really a matter of debate. The advantages are obvious and if you didn't realize it you probably weren't taught well enough. On topic: I sometimes wonder if the wins from FP languages are lost on the people not already scarred by the pitfalls of imperative programming. I wonder the same about someone starting with Python instead of something more wordy and cumbersome. I don't think you really can appreciate the ease of use if you haven't already written tons of boilerplate or type information because the compiler is stupid. At the same time you don't know the price of the ease you're getting, so there is a warped perspective on both the ease of programming and the performance of languages. Haskell, I think, exists in a sort of middle ground where it's actually really fast but extremely expressive. Maybe someone uninitiated in programming won't have as many problems formulating functional solutions to problems in Haskell too.
      - mpweiher 12y ago
        That's exactly the kind of hair-raising and mindless (in the truest sense of the word) nonsense we were presented with: "the superiority of FP is not a matter for debate". The reality was that the tools were slower and buggier than others, the programs different (and slower) but no simpler and the bugs different but stilly just as buggy. When presented so mindlessly and categorically, any claims of superiority instantly lose credibility. When reality is taken into account, even more so.
        59nadir 12y ago
        The principles used in FP are actual principles you could employ in imperative languages... and people do, because they are obviously good. It's a matter of there actually being principles instead of the alternative; nothing. This aside, you seem to be talking about the languages themselves, so let's go ahead: > the tools were slower Which tools are these? I don't see this as a systematic failure of FP languages. Which language were you presented with? Did they explain what you're trading your speed of execution for? I'm asking these questions because it doesn't really seem like you got it and this supposedly being 20 years later it seems like you're purposefully not getting it. In these discussions I find that a lot of people believe FP proponents to be very unpragmatic, but I find that in most cases, such as this one, there is little to no concession made on the "other side". Most FP languages are not suitable for performance sensitive tasks and most people will admit this. For most other tasks, though, they're just going to allow you to work faster and get to where you're going with less hassle. I would like to point out that I'm not saying FP languages are just better overall or that an FP language is always the best choice, but I am saying that the principles they employ and teach undeniably are the best. The alternative isn't as much a principle as it is a lack of principle. Flipping individual switches and modifying memory is just not caring.
  - fractallyte 12y ago
    Here's a relevant comment I made just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956162 In short, Scheme (Racket) is regarded as a superior beginner's language because of its simplicity, together with the ability to explore various paradigms (including OO). Beginners in Scheme subsequently did better with Java than those who started solely with Java. I think there's a deep lesson in that...
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      But scheme/racket is really not that far off from java compared to Haskell. I've never had a hard time working with it, even though I've never learned it formally (ok, two weeks of LISP a long time ago). Racket never felt weird, and many of its API are OO in everything but name, it's like C# with the same amount of FP abstractions (list comprehensions), and maybe some macros and continuations if you want to do something advanced. But Haskell really is functional programming, there is no way to accidentally create an easy to use OO-style library. And then there are the monads....
      - steveklabnik 12y ago
        Monads are pretty simple if you aren't pre-emptively primed with "monads are really hard." I remember the day I sat down, worked through some examples, and grokked monads. I said, "That's it?" That's not to say that they can't be hard to learn. I just don't think that they're _inherently_ hard to learn, and I think that they're sufficiently different enough from 'more traditional' CS concepts that said other concepts can hamper your ability to learn them. I suggest http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/baastad.pdf http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/ba... if you're still trying to figure them out. Fun story: one time I had to suddenly explain monads to an English professor, because she overheard me say the word and said, "wait, Leibnitz?"
- klrr 12y ago
  I'm a teen I guess. Haskell as a first language worked great for me, and I happened to write a game and a few scripts in Python two months ago so I think I can answer your question. So, what made learning Haskell a good experience I think was mainly the strong type system. You could basically even early on use functions you barely knew what its name meant solely based on its type signature. It also made the progress of writing a program very nice, you write it and then it fails, you go back and try fix it, and when it compiles it usually worked. There are some things to keep in mind though. Wild recursion is really the GOTO of functional languages, it's important to teach how to use the generalized folds and traversals early on. Secondly it is important to have simple analogies to concepts such as functors, monoids and monads etc. If you make sure to not care about these strange names then you can go pretty far by just trying to make the type signatures stick together, and it's not important for a beginner to grasp these directly either. Python was quite smooth to learn coming from Haskell, the syntax is similar and it simply felt like programming in Haskell's do-blocks. It was very easy to get quickly going, I managed to write a little script talking to a JSON API almost directly after reading the official tutorial. I also digged a little bit into the realm of OOP, I wrote a simple game using Kivy. It felt quite nice actually, I could get some code re-use, although it was harder to get that (as newbie) than in Haskell. EDIT: Something like typed Racket might been even better when I think about it, since Racket got a lot of resources for complete beginners. Then you get the benefit of easy to use syntax too, although syntax is probably not the biggest problem when starting out. For the record I usually recommend Python or Racket when people ask me where to start, because in the end I don't think it matter much what language you go with first, just make sure not to limit the paradigm of languages you learn afterwards.
  - codygman 12y ago
    Thanks for sharing your experiences! I've always been curious about this.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Or traumatize them forever away from the field of programming. The same can be said about using Python et al as the first programming language. How many people quit an introductory course to programming because they didn't like (say) the style of programming in Python, but could get an interest in it if the language being taught was some FP one (or maybe a logic programming language, etc.)? It's kind of hard to tell, because students who get turned away from an introductory course on programming probably aren't going to look up (or even know about) "programming paradigms" and see whether there are alternatives. Granted, how long would these people survive in the job market if they were able to be "traumatized" by some imperative language? There are certainly more imperative language jobs (or, they tend more to imperative style than FP style) in the job market, it seems. But even if they wouldn't like working as a programmer, they can still use it as a hobby if they like.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Non-math will always be more accessible than math. Unless you are teaching a bunch of mathematicians, then perhaps they would prefer the formal FP approach. Python is nice because you don't need to know about category Rory to get started.
judk 12y ago
This has been done with Scheme and works really well. But Haskell really is too complex.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Scheme is quite simple compared to Haskell or even ML. Yet even MIT moved from Scheme to Python.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Did they have pure intentions in that move? I thought it was more out of popularity than any good metric.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Who knows, everyone has their own opinion about it. Perhaps it was just too many parentheses for students to deal with.
      - judk 12y ago
        MIT switched to Python because they believe modern basic CS is about controlling complex systems (web APIs, robot APIs) not walking through the history of CS from scratch and bare metal.
        fractallyte 12y ago
        Here are a couple of quotes from 'Realm of Racket', just to expand on your statement: 'All members of this [ALGOL] family are made from more or less the same material and for the same kind of programmers - those who love the machine more than the problem.' Contrast with Lisp: 'a language that would help programmers solve problems without forcing them to think about the elements of a machine.' So it really depends on one's interpretation of 'Computer Science', and the choice of what to prioritize from the subject: engineering or ideas.
username223 12y ago
> Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop? They would probably be at least as mystified by infinite loops as Python programmers are by space leaks.
- thinkpad20 12y ago
  There are infinite loops in Haskell too. (And space leaks in python)
  - username223 12y ago
    Are any of the space leaks available without explicit syntax, e.g. genexps? GHC is smart, but only smart enough to mostly hide your misunderstandings about what it can do with your code.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      A space leak is simply pinning memory unintentionally, which definitely happens in most garbage collected languages. Perhaps Python programmers would be baffled by time leaks instead :)
Quiark 12y ago
That's what my university did (Masaryk University Brno). It taught Haskell in the first semester. I, already programming in other stuff, was delighted to see a new interesting thing. Other students who already did some coding (PHP usually) reacted more like W.T.F. I'd this. I can't tell about the total newbs but in the end, only 30-40% passed. But that was mostly caused by their laziness because when they repeated the class and realized that they have to put in some work, the success was much better.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  If your class has a 30-40% pass rate! you have to blame it more than just on laziness. Actually, I thought laziness was a virtue in Haskell.
Figs 12y ago
Doesn't the University of Edinburgh teach Haskell to first year students? I've heard that from a few people at least. Not sure what their classes are like though.
- Swayworn 12y ago
  If you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtRG9GLtNcHBv4cuh2w1cz5VsgY6adoc3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtRG9GLtNcHBv4cuh2w1c...
ics 12y ago
I think it's pretty great. I didn't start programming until relatively late, but the more I study Haskell the more it feels like [an evolved form of] what I imagined programming to be when I was just a kid– busy syntax and all. Admittedly my misconceptions (I'll call them that because had I begun programming as a kid it probably would've been in Smalltalk, HyperCard, or C depending on where I was at the time) are one of the things that scared me away from exploring that path, but I one of the key factors would most certainly have been the tooling. The OP came up in my news feeds earlier today and I took a look at codeworld for the first time. Had that existed while being shown something like Haskell as a kid, I think I would've come back for more.
tluyben2 12y ago
I learnt (somewhere around 15 years ago) Haskell as 6th programming language and I remember finding it very confusing while my friends who had never programmed before didn't have as much issues with it. The second language they got taught was Java and after Haskell they very much disliked it. All of them (of course...) ended up as Java programmers in boring banking (etc) projects, but I do remember how they liked Haskell over it. Now, Java isn't exactly Python...
quesebifurcan 12y ago
> Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop? Interesting question. My first language was (Common) Lisp. Not sure if it was a good or bad choice (wasn't a choice really, more of a coincidence), or if those terms even apply. Anyway, I'm fairly certain it took me much longer than necessary to get my first projects done (hint: some of them were never finished). I spent a lot of time trying to express my ideas in a functional style -- avoiding the loop macro, avoiding side-effects whenever possible etc. Slowly but surely drifting away from the actual problems I had set out to solve. The feeling I got when I discovered Python is very accurately described in that xkcd comic which pops up in your browser when you type "import antigravity" in the interpreter. Then again, if Lisp was a detour on the path to becoming an "efficient and productive programmer", it was certainly a deeply interesting one which left me hungry for more -- I'm learning Haskell now (who isn't?) and am enjoying it immensely.
Chattered 12y ago
Speaking as your brother, the thing that tipped me onto the preconceptions thing was the odd student who, with no prior programming experience, declared "oh, I get it. It's just maths!" I was the TA on the Edinburgh Haskell course over a couple of years, and took the attitude that, whether the students are any good at maths, they've at least seen it before, and so it was something I could use to bootstrap their understanding of the code they wrote. The Edinburgh course is very nicely paced. Students aren't thrown in at the deep-end. In the first tutorial we had them composing pictures along similar lines to that shown in the OP. By the third tutorial, they're using their repertoire of maps, filters and folds to do basic web scraping. The most advanced stuff we assess them on is writing recursive functions on recursive data-types, like a function that takes a simple mathematical expression and evaluates it. Come the final exam, they can pretend they'd never heard the word "monad."
dmmalam 12y ago
They actually do this at Imperial College, London for computer science. Programming 1 is 100% haskell [1]. The idea is to have a level playing field for all students as many may have had prior experience in imperative languages. [1] http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/courses/120_1 http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/courses/120_1

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

> Their lack of preconceptions regarding programming might make Haskell much easier for them to pick up, than it would for a student with experience in another language. Or traumatize them forever away from the field of programming. > Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop? I would love to know the answer to this, regardless of my own biases. But Haskell really does require discipline to use, and the kids would probably appreciate the more lax nature of Python.

MarcScott 12y ago
It's an experiment that I'll never run. CS exam requirements are geared towards OO languages. Students have to analyse and write pseudocode using traditional programming constructs.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  What are CS exam requirements? Are they standardized? I went through the American system, and never had any of my tests biased to OOP (except of course, a Smalltalk chapter in one PL zoo class). Object thinking is easier to wrap one's head around than mathematical formal thinking, but that's just because the former uses the brain's innate linguistic hardware (we learn to talk without much effort) while the latter requires training and practice.
  - gamegoblin 12y ago
    Perhaps the commenter is referring to the AP computer science class, which I think is pretty OO based? In my experience at least.
  - MarcScott 12y ago
    I teach in the UK. Here's the spec for one of our GCSE courses. http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/ict-and-computer-science/gcse/computer-science-4512 http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/ict-and-computer-science/gcse...
  - ucarion 12y ago
    The current AP standards focus a lot on OOP. Here's the latest course description: http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-computer-science-a-course-description-2014.pdf http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-comp...
- pjmlp 12y ago
  In which countries? Just had a look at the curriculum of the Portuguese university I graduated from, a couple of decades ago and they still teach OOP, FP, LP across multiple languages.
- mpweiher 12y ago
  At the TU-Berlin, our intro courses were held in FP languages, and we were indoctrinated as to the incomparable superiority of the approach...and could see for ourselves how the reality diverged from the hype. That was a good 20 years ago, but I just ran into a current student who told me that's still the case, and they still hate it as much as we did.
  - 59nadir 12y ago
    Seems like your university is doing it wrong. While I do believe that the principles used in FP languages are vastly superior I don't think this is really a matter of debate. The advantages are obvious and if you didn't realize it you probably weren't taught well enough. On topic: I sometimes wonder if the wins from FP languages are lost on the people not already scarred by the pitfalls of imperative programming. I wonder the same about someone starting with Python instead of something more wordy and cumbersome. I don't think you really can appreciate the ease of use if you haven't already written tons of boilerplate or type information because the compiler is stupid. At the same time you don't know the price of the ease you're getting, so there is a warped perspective on both the ease of programming and the performance of languages. Haskell, I think, exists in a sort of middle ground where it's actually really fast but extremely expressive. Maybe someone uninitiated in programming won't have as many problems formulating functional solutions to problems in Haskell too.
    - mpweiher 12y ago
      That's exactly the kind of hair-raising and mindless (in the truest sense of the word) nonsense we were presented with: "the superiority of FP is not a matter for debate". The reality was that the tools were slower and buggier than others, the programs different (and slower) but no simpler and the bugs different but stilly just as buggy. When presented so mindlessly and categorically, any claims of superiority instantly lose credibility. When reality is taken into account, even more so.
      - 59nadir 12y ago
        The principles used in FP are actual principles you could employ in imperative languages... and people do, because they are obviously good. It's a matter of there actually being principles instead of the alternative; nothing. This aside, you seem to be talking about the languages themselves, so let's go ahead: > the tools were slower Which tools are these? I don't see this as a systematic failure of FP languages. Which language were you presented with? Did they explain what you're trading your speed of execution for? I'm asking these questions because it doesn't really seem like you got it and this supposedly being 20 years later it seems like you're purposefully not getting it. In these discussions I find that a lot of people believe FP proponents to be very unpragmatic, but I find that in most cases, such as this one, there is little to no concession made on the "other side". Most FP languages are not suitable for performance sensitive tasks and most people will admit this. For most other tasks, though, they're just going to allow you to work faster and get to where you're going with less hassle. I would like to point out that I'm not saying FP languages are just better overall or that an FP language is always the best choice, but I am saying that the principles they employ and teach undeniably are the best. The alternative isn't as much a principle as it is a lack of principle. Flipping individual switches and modifying memory is just not caring.
- fractallyte 12y ago
  Here's a relevant comment I made just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956162 In short, Scheme (Racket) is regarded as a superior beginner's language because of its simplicity, together with the ability to explore various paradigms (including OO). Beginners in Scheme subsequently did better with Java than those who started solely with Java. I think there's a deep lesson in that...
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    But scheme/racket is really not that far off from java compared to Haskell. I've never had a hard time working with it, even though I've never learned it formally (ok, two weeks of LISP a long time ago). Racket never felt weird, and many of its API are OO in everything but name, it's like C# with the same amount of FP abstractions (list comprehensions), and maybe some macros and continuations if you want to do something advanced. But Haskell really is functional programming, there is no way to accidentally create an easy to use OO-style library. And then there are the monads....
    - steveklabnik 12y ago
      Monads are pretty simple if you aren't pre-emptively primed with "monads are really hard." I remember the day I sat down, worked through some examples, and grokked monads. I said, "That's it?" That's not to say that they can't be hard to learn. I just don't think that they're _inherently_ hard to learn, and I think that they're sufficiently different enough from 'more traditional' CS concepts that said other concepts can hamper your ability to learn them. I suggest http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/baastad.pdf http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/ba... if you're still trying to figure them out. Fun story: one time I had to suddenly explain monads to an English professor, because she overheard me say the word and said, "wait, Leibnitz?"
klrr 12y ago
I'm a teen I guess. Haskell as a first language worked great for me, and I happened to write a game and a few scripts in Python two months ago so I think I can answer your question. So, what made learning Haskell a good experience I think was mainly the strong type system. You could basically even early on use functions you barely knew what its name meant solely based on its type signature. It also made the progress of writing a program very nice, you write it and then it fails, you go back and try fix it, and when it compiles it usually worked. There are some things to keep in mind though. Wild recursion is really the GOTO of functional languages, it's important to teach how to use the generalized folds and traversals early on. Secondly it is important to have simple analogies to concepts such as functors, monoids and monads etc. If you make sure to not care about these strange names then you can go pretty far by just trying to make the type signatures stick together, and it's not important for a beginner to grasp these directly either. Python was quite smooth to learn coming from Haskell, the syntax is similar and it simply felt like programming in Haskell's do-blocks. It was very easy to get quickly going, I managed to write a little script talking to a JSON API almost directly after reading the official tutorial. I also digged a little bit into the realm of OOP, I wrote a simple game using Kivy. It felt quite nice actually, I could get some code re-use, although it was harder to get that (as newbie) than in Haskell. EDIT: Something like typed Racket might been even better when I think about it, since Racket got a lot of resources for complete beginners. Then you get the benefit of easy to use syntax too, although syntax is probably not the biggest problem when starting out. For the record I usually recommend Python or Racket when people ask me where to start, because in the end I don't think it matter much what language you go with first, just make sure not to limit the paradigm of languages you learn afterwards.
- codygman 12y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experiences! I've always been curious about this.
Dewie 12y ago
> Or traumatize them forever away from the field of programming. The same can be said about using Python et al as the first programming language. How many people quit an introductory course to programming because they didn't like (say) the style of programming in Python, but could get an interest in it if the language being taught was some FP one (or maybe a logic programming language, etc.)? It's kind of hard to tell, because students who get turned away from an introductory course on programming probably aren't going to look up (or even know about) "programming paradigms" and see whether there are alternatives. Granted, how long would these people survive in the job market if they were able to be "traumatized" by some imperative language? There are certainly more imperative language jobs (or, they tend more to imperative style than FP style) in the job market, it seems. But even if they wouldn't like working as a programmer, they can still use it as a hobby if they like.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Non-math will always be more accessible than math. Unless you are teaching a bunch of mathematicians, then perhaps they would prefer the formal FP approach. Python is nice because you don't need to know about category Rory to get started.

judk 12y ago

This has been done with Scheme and works really well. But Haskell really is too complex.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Scheme is quite simple compared to Haskell or even ML. Yet even MIT moved from Scheme to Python.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Did they have pure intentions in that move? I thought it was more out of popularity than any good metric.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Who knows, everyone has their own opinion about it. Perhaps it was just too many parentheses for students to deal with.
    - judk 12y ago
      MIT switched to Python because they believe modern basic CS is about controlling complex systems (web APIs, robot APIs) not walking through the history of CS from scratch and bare metal.
      - fractallyte 12y ago
        Here are a couple of quotes from 'Realm of Racket', just to expand on your statement: 'All members of this [ALGOL] family are made from more or less the same material and for the same kind of programmers - those who love the machine more than the problem.' Contrast with Lisp: 'a language that would help programmers solve problems without forcing them to think about the elements of a machine.' So it really depends on one's interpretation of 'Computer Science', and the choice of what to prioritize from the subject: engineering or ideas.

username223 12y ago

> Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop? They would probably be at least as mystified by infinite loops as Python programmers are by space leaks.

thinkpad20 12y ago
There are infinite loops in Haskell too. (And space leaks in python)
- username223 12y ago
  Are any of the space leaks available without explicit syntax, e.g. genexps? GHC is smart, but only smart enough to mostly hide your misunderstandings about what it can do with your code.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    A space leak is simply pinning memory unintentionally, which definitely happens in most garbage collected languages. Perhaps Python programmers would be baffled by time leaks instead :)

Quiark 12y ago

That's what my university did (Masaryk University Brno). It taught Haskell in the first semester. I, already programming in other stuff, was delighted to see a new interesting thing. Other students who already did some coding (PHP usually) reacted more like W.T.F. I'd this. I can't tell about the total newbs but in the end, only 30-40% passed. But that was mostly caused by their laziness because when they repeated the class and realized that they have to put in some work, the success was much better.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
If your class has a 30-40% pass rate! you have to blame it more than just on laziness. Actually, I thought laziness was a virtue in Haskell.

Figs 12y ago

Doesn't the University of Edinburgh teach Haskell to first year students? I've heard that from a few people at least. Not sure what their classes are like though.

Swayworn 12y ago
If you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtRG9GLtNcHBv4cuh2w1cz5VsgY6adoc3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtRG9GLtNcHBv4cuh2w1c...

ics 12y ago

I think it's pretty great. I didn't start programming until relatively late, but the more I study Haskell the more it feels like [an evolved form of] what I imagined programming to be when I was just a kid– busy syntax and all. Admittedly my misconceptions (I'll call them that because had I begun programming as a kid it probably would've been in Smalltalk, HyperCard, or C depending on where I was at the time) are one of the things that scared me away from exploring that path, but I one of the key factors would most certainly have been the tooling. The OP came up in my news feeds earlier today and I took a look at codeworld for the first time. Had that existed while being shown something like Haskell as a kid, I think I would've come back for more.

tluyben2 12y ago

I learnt (somewhere around 15 years ago) Haskell as 6th programming language and I remember finding it very confusing while my friends who had never programmed before didn't have as much issues with it. The second language they got taught was Java and after Haskell they very much disliked it. All of them (of course...) ended up as Java programmers in boring banking (etc) projects, but I do remember how they liked Haskell over it. Now, Java isn't exactly Python...

quesebifurcan 12y ago

> Would they think Python was stupid or would they be grateful that all of a sudden they could use a for loop? Interesting question. My first language was (Common) Lisp. Not sure if it was a good or bad choice (wasn't a choice really, more of a coincidence), or if those terms even apply. Anyway, I'm fairly certain it took me much longer than necessary to get my first projects done (hint: some of them were never finished). I spent a lot of time trying to express my ideas in a functional style -- avoiding the loop macro, avoiding side-effects whenever possible etc. Slowly but surely drifting away from the actual problems I had set out to solve. The feeling I got when I discovered Python is very accurately described in that xkcd comic which pops up in your browser when you type "import antigravity" in the interpreter. Then again, if Lisp was a detour on the path to becoming an "efficient and productive programmer", it was certainly a deeply interesting one which left me hungry for more -- I'm learning Haskell now (who isn't?) and am enjoying it immensely.

Chattered 12y ago

Speaking as your brother, the thing that tipped me onto the preconceptions thing was the odd student who, with no prior programming experience, declared "oh, I get it. It's just maths!" I was the TA on the Edinburgh Haskell course over a couple of years, and took the attitude that, whether the students are any good at maths, they've at least seen it before, and so it was something I could use to bootstrap their understanding of the code they wrote. The Edinburgh course is very nicely paced. Students aren't thrown in at the deep-end. In the first tutorial we had them composing pictures along similar lines to that shown in the OP. By the third tutorial, they're using their repertoire of maps, filters and folds to do basic web scraping. The most advanced stuff we assess them on is writing recursive functions on recursive data-types, like a function that takes a simple mathematical expression and evaluates it. Come the final exam, they can pretend they'd never heard the word "monad."

dmmalam 12y ago

They actually do this at Imperial College, London for computer science. Programming 1 is 100% haskell [1]. The idea is to have a level playing field for all students as many may have had prior experience in imperative languages. [1] http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/courses/120_1 http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/computing/teaching/courses/120_1