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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (Mike Meyer)
2. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (umptious)
3. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (Ertugrul S?ylemez)
4. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (Ertugrul S?ylemez)
5. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (Mike Meyer)
6. Re: Haskell as a useful practical 'tool' for intelligent
non-programmers (umptious)
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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:23:36 -0400
From: Mike Meyer <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 03:32:48 -0400
Michael Orlitzky <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 04/29/2012 02:35 AM, Mike Meyer wrote:
> We were never talking about easy, only possible.
You may not have ever been talking about easy, but that's pretty much
all I've been talking about. In fact, that's my point: functions not
being first-class objects in ruby makes functional programming in it
harder. This makes it a poor choice if haskell (or any other language
where functional programming is de rigueur) is the goal.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <[email protected]> http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.
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------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:26:24 +0100
From: umptious <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
Cc: [email protected]
Message-ID:
<cae20bnurvoauk7pcxewgp8sjn6sbyc_nnxxfcnzqk5oagqb...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
On 29 April 2012 19:43, Ertugrul S?ylemez <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> To someone marginally skilled at logical thinking Haskell appears to be
> the first choice as the first programming language. I'm offering two
> experiences as a reference:
>
> * A friend of mine with no technical and no math background wanted to
> learn programming. I decided to go with Haskell, because it would
> be an interesting experiment.
>
> The experiment turned out to be very successful.
I suspect that most experiments in teaching programming languages with
one-to-one tuition are! If the guy had posted saying "Hey, I have a friend
who knows Haskell really well and wants to teach me" then I'd have said
that he should very seriously consider it.
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Message: 3
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:52:16 +0200
From: Ertugrul S?ylemez <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
umptious <[email protected]> wrote:
> > To someone marginally skilled at logical thinking Haskell appears to
> > be the first choice as the first programming language. I'm offering
> > two experiences as a reference:
> >
> > * A friend of mine with no technical and no math background wanted
> > to learn programming. I decided to go with Haskell, because it
> > would be an interesting experiment.
> >
> > The experiment turned out to be very successful.
>
> I suspect that most experiments in teaching programming languages with
> one-to-one tuition are! If the guy had posted saying "Hey, I have a
> friend who knows Haskell really well and wants to teach me" then I'd
> have said that he should very seriously consider it.
Your message is not related to my post, and a good indication is that
the given quote is incomplete even for the purpose of making the point
of that particular experiment. Then that point alone is also not enough
either, because there is a strong connection between the two examples I
mentioned. All in all you apparently didn't understand a word of my
post.
My statement is not about teaching, it's about learning and I'm pretty
sure it is very solid. On the other hand, your suggestion to avoid
Haskell unless you have a high IQ or math/formal logic background is
entirely unfounded. If you make a claim like this, you should provide
some reasoning.
Greets,
Ertugrul
--
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://ertes.de/
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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:13:25 +0200
From: Ertugrul S?ylemez <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Lorenzo Bolla <[email protected]> wrote:
> If you find programming interesting (as we all here do, I believe),
> than, once you've familiarized with Python, you should definitely give
> Haskell a try: I'm a beginner in Haskell, but I can say it's been the
> most enjoyable language to learn so far.
This is a weird recommendation. Let's see:
1. Learn Python (required time: p),
2. Unlearn Python (required time: u),
3. Learn Haskell (required time: h).
Python knowledge will be in your way of learning Haskell. That's why
the second step is unlearning Python. Now humans are not hard drives.
You can expect 'u' to be much greater than 'p', because you can't
command your brain to "rm -rf" the Python knowledge. While learning
Python in isolation may take three days and learning Haskell may take
two weeks, learning Haskell after Python will take months or years. The
more fluent you get in Python, the worse it will be.
In other words: If you are not a programmer and want to learn Haskell
fast, learn it as your first language. Otherwise you will considerably
increase the time needed to learn it, and you will also increase the
give-up probability, because despite the similar syntax Haskell is very
different.
Greets,
Ertugrul
--
nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex)
http://ertes.de/
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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:26:30 -0400
From: Mike Meyer <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:07:28 +0100
umptious <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> Mike Meyer: Ruby makes a bad fit if Haskell is a goal (and that's a good
> goal)
> I don't see it as being a goal for this guy! He just wants to be able to
> write utilities he needs without bogging down in "becoming a programmer."
True. But this *is* a Haskell list.
> >> While Clojure is a
> great language, the most popular implementation is hooked into the
> JVM, and you wind up needing to deal with a lot Java infrastructure
> fairly quickly. Being able to use that infrastructure is a design
> goal, but adds to the learning curve. I haven't looked into Groovy,
> but suspect some of the same issues will arise (and hope a Groovy
> programmer will correct me if I'm wrong).<<
> I played around with Groovy for a weekend to write some utilities and a
> music generation program. I can't remember having to put any effort into
> "needing to deal with a lot Java infrastructure," even though I was using a
> midi library written for pure Java. But I'm not really sure what you mean
> (installing a Java compiler?? doesn't seem like a lot) and it doesn't
> matter - Python/Sagemaths and R seem like the most reasonable tools without
> spending big money.
A weekend wouldn't do it for Clojure, either. You probably just dumped
the java library into the current directory and used it, thus avoiding
all the issues with CLASSPATH. Trying to use third party libraries
(whether written in Java or Clojure), gets you into that. That - or
trying to build something you can use without having to type "java -cp
...." - gets you into java (or clojure) build tools. Which means you
now have to use the project layout those build tools default to, or
learn how to set things up so you can keep on using your project
layout - assuming you can. And the snowball isn't done yet...
I'd much rather deal with cabal's dependency problems!
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <[email protected]> http://www.mired.org/
Independent Software developer/SCM consultant, email for more information.
O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org
------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 02:32:26 +0100
From: umptious <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] Haskell as a useful practical 'tool'
for intelligent non-programmers
To: Ertugrul S?ylemez <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Message-ID:
<CAE20bNvH_Yy9nPSEOnNu0oFvtE+O-ynNzZNjaiaTTOthAmT=f...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Your message is not related to my post, and a good indication is that
> the given quote is incomplete even for the purpose of making the point
> of that particular experiment.
If you don't believe that 1 to 1 tuition is a help learning a language,
then why did you provide it? What's the point of lists like this where
people can ask questions? Of course it is a help!
> Then that point alone is also not enough
> either, because there is a strong connection between the two examples I
> mentioned.
There would be a "strong connection" if each individual in the group got as
much time as your friend did and this time was provided to them in the same
way as she received it, motivation was the same, etc. But this isn't what
you said!
> All in all you apparently didn't understand a word of my
> post.
>
Obviously I disagree: I think that I understood what you wrote and found it
unconvincing:
-You can't conclude that because two groups are differentiated by property
X (in this case previous programming experience, with lack of it being more
favourable to learning Haskell) then property X is responsible when the
outcome of a test procedure is different. ***Not unless the test procedure
is the same and those groups are the same.***
Which wasn't the case, not nearly. Individual tuition over a time is an
ideal way to learn a language, while short taught courses are an utter
waste of time - a decent book is better.
Concluding that differences in outcome *had* due to be due to anything else
than the different methods in teaching, time spent, motivation,
relationship with the students, etc, is... well, if this was a science
paper you'd be getting a fail grade. There are so many factors here that
you haven't controlled for that it is silly. There are probably
creationists and global warming deniers who would be shocked at your
selecting the answer that you want from a host of possible ones. You've
picked X, but Y, Z, U, A, B and Alpha were all possible!
But all this is moot - the guy isn't learning to program for fun but for a
purpose. Sagemath and R have the libraries and R in particular seems to be
a lingua franca in econometrics and time series analysis, which are
probably relevant. Haskell would be a poorer tool in this area than R,
simply because knowing it wouldn't allow the guy to read useful papers.
Then there are libraries to consider...
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