malcolm.wallace: >> For use at high school level, I would imagine that you would want to build a >> special distribution anyway. One that for example already includes packages, >> such as Gloss, that would be useful in teaching children programming in >> Haskell without they having to go through learning to use cabal (which is a >> bigger hurdle than installing Xcode IMHO). >> >> But I wonder, would those students not use school equipment (which >> supposedly would have all software pre-installed)? Do they bring their own >> Macs? (I'd be surprised to find a whole class of 6th graders all owning >> Macs...) > > > As a further data point, yesterday one of my colleagues gave his 17-yr-old > daughter a copy of the "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good" book. She > started to read it, and wanted to play with Haskell on her MacBook Air. > First step, download ghc. Discover that it will not install on Leopard. > Step two: upgrade the operating system to Snow Leopard. One hour later, > attempt to install ghc again. Discover that it requires XCode. Step three: > buy XCode from the mac App Store, and wait two hours for the 4Gb download > over a hotel wifi connection Step four: hotel wifi access runs out before > the download is complete, so give up and go back to watching the movie she > downloaded earlier, but has not been able to watch whilst all this > downloading and upgrading has been happening.
That is a nice story, but it doesn't change what I wrote earlier: * It would be nice to have a lightweight Haskell learner's distro (for your colleagues 17-yr-old daughter and others), preferably with libraries like a web framework, Gloss, etc included — an all in one package. * The standard, production-ready Haskell distro shouldn't duplicate tools already provided by the platform vendor, especially not C compiler and libraries that quickly lead to subtly hard to find bugs in projects that use these tools also directly (and not just via GHC). Manuel _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
