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Comment by aye01 | Hacker News Reader

i have never heard of haskell being a language used for teaching introductory computer science courses. that sounds like a nightmare. i'd imagine mid-to-upper div classes.

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Actually Haskell is excellent for an introduction. The problem with Haskell is that it may be hard hard to get "real stuff done" so to say, i.e. in an industry setting where you have to interact with many external services or libraries (and then miss those specific libraries).

If you're learning the basics of Computer Science you usually don't have to do this so Haskell is a great language then.

Haskell was the first programming language taught at our college when I was a student, where some of the students hadn't even used a computer before. It went fine. (I think it was actually better than other languages would have been, as many of the students had a background in mathematics and might have been confused by things like "x = x + 1", while they were comfortable with the idea of a function, at least as used in mathematics.)

If you'd like to see for yourself what that course was like, here are lecture notes (and assignments, and mid-term exam): https://www.cmi.ac.in/~madhavan/courses/programming08/index....

Right. Long ago a group of Oxford physicists with no computing experience were baffled by "LET X=X+1", which the demonstrator failed to explain in terms of a storage model.

Orwell (Haskell predecessor) was used later at Oxford, and I think ML at the other university. "Preparing to study Computer Science at Cambridge" once said "Teaching yourself to program can lead to your picking up bad habits that will hinder your progress later. In particular, you should avoid languages like C++."

In the mid 90s, first year computer science at the Australian National University used Miranda, the proprietary language from which Haskell was forking at the time. It was great. When I read SICP later, the first half seemed like a long-winded demonstration of obvious ways to use recursion. Didn't everyone know this stuff?

Much of the language seemed like magic, but ANU had a culture of throwing students in the deep end to keep us humble about what we knew.

Haskell is a great language to learn as an introductory language with the right teacher and text. Read Hutton's book and come back here and tell me you found it to be too difficult for a beginner.

UChicago's honors introductory sequence uses it: http://cmsc-16100.cs.uchicago.edu/

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