> much of the blogging community has (I think wrongly) focused on explaining advanced concepts rather than making easy introductions.
I would like to make two notes about this:
- Most of the Haskell tutorial examples are about computing pi, fibs, and other math functions or series. Which is fine, but rather obvious beyond the recursion vs iteration bit. It's not just that newcomers arrive to Haskell with an imperative mindset, it's that they (we?) come with imperative (stateful) algorithms, which of course turn out to be a nightmare to implement.
- I found those explanations about Monads, etc necessary because as soon as I wanted to do anything less obvious than calculating a function or series, it was pretty hard to figure out how to get it done. For example, adding print logs to my code to debug, or building the code to output the formatted result of my program. "Why can't I use map here?" "What is is this mapM thing?" are very real roadblocks.
Those problems are not unique to Haskell, of course, but Haskell's purity makes it much more inflexible - you can't do some part the Haskell way to learn the ropes while you do the rest imperatively to get actual, satisfying results.
I would like to make two notes about this:
- Most of the Haskell tutorial examples are about computing pi, fibs, and other math functions or series. Which is fine, but rather obvious beyond the recursion vs iteration bit. It's not just that newcomers arrive to Haskell with an imperative mindset, it's that they (we?) come with imperative (stateful) algorithms, which of course turn out to be a nightmare to implement.
- I found those explanations about Monads, etc necessary because as soon as I wanted to do anything less obvious than calculating a function or series, it was pretty hard to figure out how to get it done. For example, adding print logs to my code to debug, or building the code to output the formatted result of my program. "Why can't I use map here?" "What is is this mapM thing?" are very real roadblocks.
Those problems are not unique to Haskell, of course, but Haskell's purity makes it much more inflexible - you can't do some part the Haskell way to learn the ropes while you do the rest imperatively to get actual, satisfying results.