4 ms·
I think its a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP
by spion 11y ago
I think its a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP programmers did turn my attention to FP languages. Turns out, there is this amazing group of people that are trying to build an entire ecosystem that stands on solid mathematical foundations. That was really exciting stuff for me. For years I've been watching our profession struggle with brilliant but ad-hoc creations, every single time being crushed by its accumulating weight of crutches and of the impossibility to reason about things once they grow to a certain size. Now it seems like we're really close to fixing this (that is, even outside of academia).
But maybe there is a way of getting people's attention without causing unnecessary extra damage. We (as a profession) ought to be able to do better than that...
- thomasahle 11y agoHaskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those. We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.
- crimsonalucard 11y agoHaskell may not be the wisest language to start with. It's different from almost everything out there.
- codygman 11y agoI feel learning one Algol derived language such as Python followed by Haskell is a good solution. Perhaps even better (of not more painful) would be to learn C followed by Haskell.
- EugeneOZ 11y agoAdvice to start learning programming from Haskell or Lisp or C++ is arrogance.
- warkid 11y agoPefectly fine I one takes full responsibility for own advice.
- codygman 11y agoHow so? I'd appreciate you expanding on it, as well as responding to the existence of these: Teaching Haskell to a 10 year old[0] Realm of Racket[1] Land of lisp[2] 0: https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haskell-to-a-10-year-old-day-1/ https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haske... 1: http://realmofracket.com/ http://realmofracket.com/ 2: http://landoflisp.com/ http://landoflisp.com/
- thomasahle 11y agoI know Haskell is the introductory programming language of choice at many British universities like Oxford and Cambridge. In the US C, C++ and Scheme (functional) are all in the top 6 most common ( http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/176450-python-is-now-the-most-popular-introductory-teaching-language-at-top-us-universities/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/176450-python-is-now-the... ) so I don't see at all why those shouldn't be good choices.