On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 12:40:55PM -0400, Daniel Carrera wrote: > In your opinion, do you think Haskell is appropriate for someone with > zero math background? I can't imagine how I'd explain something like > currying to someone who doesn't know math.
I'd think it'd be pretty easy for a non-mathy non-programmer person to learn (based on pure speculation--I've never taught haskell). There is a sort of "basic core" of haskell that is pretty easy, and most of the higher level concepts are a sort of nicer way to say the same thing. For example, while lambda expressions are very nice, it's always possible to do the same thing by declaring a named function in a let or where clause.
I'm reminded of something mentioned by Alan Kay in a recent interview published in ACM Queue magazine:
[[
AK [...]
One of the things that people realized from these extensible languages is that there is the unfortunate difficulty of making the meta-system easy to use. Smalltalk-72 was actually used by children. You’re always extending the language without realizing it when you are making ordinary classes. The result of this was that you didn’t have to go into a more esoteric place like a compiler compiler—Yacc or something like that—to add some extension to the language.
But the flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
SF And late-night extensible programming is unsupportable.
AK Exactly. So Smalltalk actually went from something that was completely extensible to one where we picked a syntax that allowed for a variety of forms of what was fixed, and concentrated on the extensibility of meaning in it.
This is not completely satisfactory. One of the things that I think should be done today is to have a fence that you have to hop to forcibly remind you that you’re now in a meta-area—that you are now tinkering with the currency system itself, you are not just speculating. But it should allow you to do it without any other overhead once you’ve crossed this fence, because when you want to do it, you want to do it.
]]
-- http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273
When I read the above, I found myself thinking of two styles of Haskell programming: on one hand there are some, many on these mailing lists, but I pick Oleg as an exemplar, who continue to baffle me with the amazing tricks they can do with (say) the Haskell type system. And there are "ordinary programmers" (like myself) who want to use Haskell's small core and (not-so-small) type system to find more elegant ways to write application software (e.g. http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/vital/ - if IO were added). I find that higher order functions and currying provide powerful tools to isolate different aspects of a program's functionality, but I'm not sure I'd want to explain them to a complete novice programmer.
So, responding to the original comment, I think there's a core of Haskell that's probably quite suitable for non-mathematical programmers, but there's a lot of potential to build application frameworks that requires a mathematical kind of abstract and analytical approach, if not specifically a mathematical background. A challenge that I think a little about, sometimes, is how to keep them distinct, which is a point to which Alan Kay seems to be alluding (above).
#g
------------ Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact
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