On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, James Wilkinson wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Umar Goldeli said:
>
> >Seriously though.. teaching kids at uni languages that are completely and
> >utterly useless (and UNSW still does this - Haskall (sp?) - a Miranda
> >replacement or somehting.. is a complete and tter waste of time..
> >
> >I mean what use is a functionally orientated language which can't do much
> >apart from using it in a mathematical context?
>
> Because as Crossfire was saying, you need to start with a language that
> teaches you the concepts in an easy to grasp way. Haskell is a
> brilliant teaching language,
This gets asserted all the time, and I absolutely disagree. Haskell is a
language that is superbly elegant in some ways, and this makes people
like lecturers and bright people who have studied a few languages wax
lyrical about it's virtues. I do it myself. However, that is definitely
not the same thing as being a good teaching language. I would say that I
learnt close to nothing at all about programming in general from
learning Haskell, at least not much that fell into place until quite a
bit later.
Haskell's syntax is not as straightforward and clean as people make out,
as can be witnessed by the lecturer's inability to explain when I asked
him to explain the difference between the various forms of the fold
function. Haskell's statelessness makes it quite ugly in some ways
(e.g. i/o). The statelessnes and functional paradigm mean that of all
the languages you could pick, there will be minimal transfer of ideas
from Haskell to other languages until the student becomes proficient in
several languages, when they will suddenly find themselves admiring
Haskell (and probably thinking it's a good teaching choice).
Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should learn Haskell at some
point. But that's more more aesthetic than teaching reasons.
> and it was also suitably different from
> anything anyone would have had experience with before they begun uni,
> thus putting everyone on a flat playing field at the beginning of the
> course.
They also talked about its similarity to maths, and since maths is the
only skill you can pretty much gaurantee CS entrants will have, this was
taken to be a Good Thing (TM).
> Conversely, though, I really enjoyed coding in Haskell, it was easy to
> debug, you could program based on a few rules that you had to remember
> to adhere to, code just fell out of your brain and 99% of the time
> worked first go ;)
I'm wondering if you did MahJong in Haskell. I loved writing small
programs in Haskell. Writing longer programs made me feel like reaching
for an AK-47 and finding a bell-tower.
cheers,
Martin
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