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What about Haskell is too complex? If you go through A Gentle Introduction to Haskell[0] I think you'll see it's a pretty simple language. There aren't that ma

What about Haskell is too complex? If you go through A Gentle Introduction to Haskell[0] I think you'll see it's a pretty simple language. There aren't that many parts of core Haskell to learn about. Perhaps the abstractions such as Monad and Functor are more complex, but they don't seem anymore complex than some of the design patterns used to accomplish what they're used for. 0: http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/ http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/

gizmo686 12y ago
Monad and Functor are abstract, not complex. One of the things that is easy to forget once you know something is that the complex and concrete thing is often easier to understand than the simple and abstract thing. Of course, eventually you begin to consider the abstract thing to be concrete.
- cousin_it 12y ago
  If you just stick to the idea of type classes, then yeah, it is simple and abstract, even for constructor classes like Functor and Monad. But the reality of type classes in Haskell is not as simple, I think. Defaulting rules, "deriving", Paterson conditions, instance coherence, functional dependencies, etc.
cdsmith 12y ago
It's worth mentioning that the tool this blog post is about defines a simplified version of Haskell's standard library. In particular, there are no type classes exported from Prelude, much less monads or functors. In the end, it's not really any more complex than Scheme, except for syntax. Now, true, the syntax is much more complicated than Scheme. You can operators and precedence and all that. But while definitely complex, it is mostly consistent with math notation. I tried to teach with Scheme first (following www.bootstrapworld.org) before I created this, and I found the change in syntax from what they are used to can be a real obstacle for children. This is also consistent with the comment about MIT moving to Python, which similarly has much more complex but familiar syntax.

gizmo686 12y ago

Monad and Functor are abstract, not complex. One of the things that is easy to forget once you know something is that the complex and concrete thing is often easier to understand than the simple and abstract thing. Of course, eventually you begin to consider the abstract thing to be concrete.

cousin_it 12y ago
If you just stick to the idea of type classes, then yeah, it is simple and abstract, even for constructor classes like Functor and Monad. But the reality of type classes in Haskell is not as simple, I think. Defaulting rules, "deriving", Paterson conditions, instance coherence, functional dependencies, etc.

cdsmith 12y ago

It's worth mentioning that the tool this blog post is about defines a simplified version of Haskell's standard library. In particular, there are no type classes exported from Prelude, much less monads or functors. In the end, it's not really any more complex than Scheme, except for syntax. Now, true, the syntax is much more complicated than Scheme. You can operators and precedence and all that. But while definitely complex, it is mostly consistent with math notation. I tried to teach with Scheme first (following www.bootstrapworld.org) before I created this, and I found the change in syntax from what they are used to can be a real obstacle for children. This is also consistent with the comment about MIT moving to Python, which similarly has much more complex but familiar syntax.