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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

One way to process this list is to see it as an elitist construct intended to put you down or degrade you or extract money from you for training etc.(which might even be true, but generally it is better, ime, to assume that people are genuinely trying to provide what they see as value)

The other is to ignore any insult, intended, perceived, or a mix of both, ignore all the hierarchy labeling - 'beginner', 'advanced beginner', "standard ladder" etc who tf cares? - and just see if there are skills you can pick up or explore on your own.

That said, I laughed at 'equational reasoning' being considered an 'expert skill'. It is considered an advanced technique but imo the basics are trivial to pick up, and I had a lecture/demo on this at a local fp conf. Sure it can get very hard if you tackle a hard problem, but that is true for everything.

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I saw this pdf before all the angry comments, and was very excited to see a list of fun topics to explore and learn. I love skill trees in Skyrim etc, and to me this looked like a real life version! Time to level up!

Yeah, not sure what all the fervour is about. I've found the biggest hurdle to advancing is knowing what to study next; this helps solve that.

I definitely agree that the most difficult part of learning something new especially something as esoteric as FP is knowing where to start and then where to go from there. I also benefited from and highly recommend functional-programming-jargon(https://github.com/hemanth/functional-programming-jargon).

The SJW crowd started their predictable shrieking as soon as this was published.

I have offered paid training at Lambda Conf in the past with my coauthor Julie and I am opposed to this ladder for _many_ reasons.

I think the class (as in hierarchy) and topic-chasing anxiety it will induce in many is counter-productive. It's extremely flawed as a guide for what to learn or what in order to learn things as well. One of the worst attempts I've seen on that front in fact. And yeah, the labels are useless anyway. It doesn't really matter what one thinks a "beginner" is.

It's also just bad optics. I don't know why John does stuff like this.

I'm not sure I would have called it a 'ladder', and the fine grained tiering into buckets seems overly ambitious, but I'm guessing you'd end up agreeing that there are topics that most beginners will find confusing/unfamiliar. If the end goal is to make it easier to sort talks into tracks for conferences, what's the issue? Do you really think Profunctor Optics should be a beginner level talk, or that using "functors" should be advanced? I'm sure you could argue specifics or make a good case for mistakes made in this chart, but to say "I don't know why John does stuff like this" seems unnecessarily harsh.

In response only to the third point, there are some very nice examples of "advanced" equational reasoning in the work of Richard Bird. Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design [0] is a great book for exploring this and demonstrates a very "expert" nature.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Ri...

I don't think it's mentioned anywhere in the poster, but it's also perhaps worth noting that this came out of a survey, it wasn't just dreamed up by one person / a few people.

(A tweet thanking survey respondents: https://twitter.com/lambda_conf/status/803695274896093184)

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