Re:The self-hating web developer
by thomasahle on Sunday July 19, 2015 @06:56AM
(#9910771)
Haskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those.
We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.
Advice to start learning programming from Haskell or Lisp or C++ is arrogance.
How so? I'd appreciate you expanding on it, as well as responding to the existence of these:
Teaching Haskell to a 10 year old[0]
Realm of Racket[1]
Land of lisp[2]
0: https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haske...
Re:The self-hating web developer
by thomasahle on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @07:08PM
(#9926537)
I know Haskell is the introductory programming language of choice at many British universities like Oxford and Cambridge. In the US C, C++ and Scheme (functional) are all in the top 6 most common ( http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/176450-python-is-now-the... ) so I don't see at all why those shouldn't be good choices.
Pefectly fine I one takes full responsibility for own advice.
Re:The self-hating web developer
by crimsonalucard on Sunday July 19, 2015 @10:44AM
(#9911333)
Haskell may not be the wisest language to start with. It's different from almost everything out there.
On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP programmers did turn my attention to FP languages. Turns out, there is this amazing group of people that are trying to build an entire ecosystem that stands on solid mathematical foundations. That was really exciting stuff for me. For years I've been watching our profession struggle with brilliant but ad-hoc creations, every single time being crushed by its accumulating weight of crutches and of the impossibility to reason about things once they grow to a certain size. Now it seems like we're really close to fixing this (that is, even outside of academia).
But maybe there is a way of getting people's attention without causing unnecessary extra damage. We (as a profession) ought to be able to do better than that...