nemesis wrote:

> Whoa, seem things didn't improve since "A gentle introduction to 
> Haskell".  Someone said:  "gentle as a heavy metal concert"... :D

http://arcanux.org/lambdacats/gentle-intro.jpg

> OTOH, how can you possibly tell people about benefits of a functional 
> language without mentioning recursion and tail-recursion?  How to tell 
> what's so great about Haskell's type system without showing what it's 
> all about?
> 
> They could just give short code examples of how to achieve practical 
> stuff, but how would they explaing the code without some theoretical 
> background about such issues and differences to imperative programming 
> with outdated type systems?
> 
> It's not easy at all to try and write such book...

Indeed. I've sat down to write a tutorial myself several times. It 
always seems to degenerate into "oh, wait, I can't use that as an 
example because it requires this *other* feature that I didn't meantion 
yet..."

As I say, Haskell's features are pretty simple, but there's about half a 
dozen of them, and they're all inter-related. It makes it really 
difficult to figure out where to start.

I don't know if you read it, but I really did think Chapter 1 started 
rather well. It's just that Chapter 2 seemed to skip randomly from topic 
to topic in an incoherant way.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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