Re:Wadler's critique of SICP (1987)
by thesz on Thursday August 04, 2011 @01:39PM
(#2846906)
"SICP in Miranda" would prepare reader for type system. So the reader of that imaginary version of SICP wouldn't encounter those roadblocks. And those who read Learn You A Haskell don't encounter ones.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
I challenge both of those assertions. I haven't done LYAH, because I was learning haskell before it existed, but I did nearly every available haskell tutorial when I was learning.
As soon as you step out of bounds, you find strange corners of the type system. It's quite a complex beast, and many of the error messages are cryptic at best.
I had two colleagues who done LYAH and one who attacked a program with type level programming without LYAH (because of LYAH non-existense at the moment).
The first two didn't asked me or my colleague about anything type system related too often. After month or so of on-off work on his project one of them finished a complex translator from CPU description into VHDL.
The one who studied Haskell without LYAH did asked us. I attribute it to complexity of program he worked on.
My experience allows me to remain confirmed that proper exposure to Haskell type system greatly lessen associated burden.
I should note that we didn't encounter many errors in our Haskell code. Much less than in code in Java or C#.