Malcolm Wallace: > On 10 Jun 2011, at 02:15, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote: > >> Anybody who is halfway serious about developing software on a Mac will have >> Xcode installed anyway. > > As the original poster clarified, the motivating use-case is education > (specifically a class of 12-13 year olds.) These are not "serious > developers", but they have the potential to become serious. Placing > unnecessary hurdles in their way will diminish the chances of their > discovering Haskell to be a beautiful language.
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...) > Having said that, I do think that Hugs (or maybe Helium) would be a more > appropriate environment for teaching the basics to young students. That or a customised version of GHC with the right libraries pre-installed etc, and editor included, etc. Manuel _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
