8 ms·

I have mastered it, but I have not drunk so much Kool-Aid that I have forgotten what it took! It sure did not take "no time," and much longer than an hour - lo

I have mastered it, but I have not drunk so much Kool-Aid that I have forgotten what it took! It sure did not take "no time," and much longer than an hour - longer than any other programming language I have attempted. The biggest stumbling blocks were syntactical. For example, there are three ways to declare a variable (let-in, let, and <-) and if you use the wrong one, you get a very unhelpful error message. The learning was not so much new concepts but instead things like how a "not in scope" error means you used a tab instead of spaces. I completely agree, the underlying concepts are elegant, and powerful and enlightening and quite amazing. But you can understand the concepts perfectly and still not be able to write a line of Haskell. That's where most tutorials fall short.

exDM69 12y ago
Perhaps you interpreted me a bit too literally. Of course it takes time for internalizing new and foreign concepts. The lecture, lesson or exercise might only take an hour but it may take days or weeks to grok the concepts. And this might mean a lot of practice. I certainly remember having a hard time understanding this years ago, and my problem was probably the same as yours - the lack of nice books and tutorials (but things are a bit better now) as well as it all being new and foreign. I don't regret putting in the effort, though. I also do not like the inconsistency in let-in vs. let (do notation), but I guess there's a good reason for that. <- is not strictly "variable assignment" but it seems superficially similar, though (if comparing to imperative languages). But I don't think these issues can be "fixed" without turning Haskell into something completely different (e.g. something more like ML). Or do you have a good suggestion how to simplify this without making it worse?

8 ms·

I have mastered it, but I have not drunk so much Kool-Aid that I have forgotten what it took! It sure did not take "no time," and much longer than an hour - lo

by millstone 12y ago

exDM69 12y ago
Perhaps you interpreted me a bit too literally. Of course it takes time for internalizing new and foreign concepts. The lecture, lesson or exercise might only take an hour but it may take days or weeks to grok the concepts. And this might mean a lot of practice. I certainly remember having a hard time understanding this years ago, and my problem was probably the same as yours - the lack of nice books and tutorials (but things are a bit better now) as well as it all being new and foreign. I don't regret putting in the effort, though. I also do not like the inconsistency in let-in vs. let (do notation), but I guess there's a good reason for that. <- is not strictly "variable assignment" but it seems superficially similar, though (if comparing to imperative languages). But I don't think these issues can be "fixed" without turning Haskell into something completely different (e.g. something more like ML). Or do you have a good suggestion how to simplify this without making it worse?