Invisible wrote:
> Or maybe it's just that "Haskell" is a really *huge* subject...

You know the other thing you're probably doing? You're probably trying to 
present everything about a particular part of the information before moving 
on. You're (say) trying to describe all about laziness before delving into 
I/O, or vice versa, when they're really completely interrelated.

Ask yourself "how would the person who designed this system have figured 
this out?" Then tell the story.

In other words, you can start out saying "laziness lets you talk about what 
will be evaluated in the future without evaluating it yet." Then you skip 
all the details beyond that, describe I/O as if that description of laziness 
is enough to understand the I/O, then go in and say "Given that I/O works 
that way, what features do we need laziness to have?" And then you discuss 
the rest of lazy evaluation.   Something like that.

Next time you go to a movie or something, watch how they at the beginning 
make references to things that happen near the end.

So your outline for things with circular references has to have at the start 
enough about the stuff at the end that you can understand the stuff in the 
middle without understanding all the stuff at the start.

> When searching with Google, I never know whether I'm just using the 
> wrong search term, or whether the document I'm searching for actually 
> doesn't exist. I rather suspect it's almost always the latter. (Except 
> that every now and then, Darren will pop up and write an almost 
> identical search term and it comes back with useful data...)

You have to remember that google indexes mostly answers, not questions. On 
the other hand, the magic of google is that it also indexes to a large 
extent the questions (because it takes into account the text on pages 
containing links to the results it gives - see "googlebombing").

> Oh, I think I've got that down. It's putting the pieces back together 
> into a coherent whole that I don't do well.

You have to break it down.

> Each individual concept isn't too difficult to explain. Trying to figure 
> out the best order in which to explain all of them is maddeningly 
> difficult.

Lies to children. Explain each bit only enough to understand the *next* bit, 
not the bit you're explaining now.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
  "How did he die?"   "He got shot in the hand."
     "That was fatal?"
          "He was holding a live grenade at the time."

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