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Comment by pelotom | Hacker News Reader

Better yet, teach them a language which doesn't even have the "extra layer of [OO] nonsense". Teach them something simple, clean, and logical. Teach them Haskell.

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You need monads to do any IO, that's not an easy first lesson. And you are a great distance from hardware.

    main = print "Hello, World!"

Not a monad in sight. Yes, print is an IO Action, but you don't have to use monads to do IO. Add in 'interact' and a you can be writing trivial stdin / stdout programs very quickly.

The first point is not too much of a downer, actually: it's not much harder to learn the IO monad as pure syntactic sugar than to learn printf and its ilk.

Scheme should be used not Haskell! Haskell can be used in a Algorithems class or something but in the beginning use Scheme.

Yick, then you've got an extra layer of type nonsense.

Without types, how do you know you're not writing nonsense?

As someone who gave Haskell a shot, I was very quickly put off by having to learn functions to convert from integers to floats, while such things were automatically taken care of by more low-level programming languages such as C.

Also, I was confused by the package management with Cabal, and now I appear to have broken it with an error message whenever I start ghci. When choosing a first language for students, you have to think of idiots such as me.

I love Haskell. I hate Cabal. It's a bunch of semi-opaque goo on top of a compilation process that wasn't terribly hard to start with.

Where exactly were you mixing integers and floats? In my experience it doesn't come up too often, and if it does (e.g. writing area = 2 * pi * r) you'd be better served changing the 2 to 2.0.

I sometimes want to avoid using floats because of the inaccuracy that sometimes arise with their use. If I recall correctly, in Haskell division requires the numerator and denominator to be of the class fractional. So how I did integer division was something like this

round (fromIntegral x / fromIntegral y)

round is one of several functions that transform numbers to integers.

    Prelude> 5 `div` 2
    2

Haskell's doing the right thing here by having a separate function for integer division. It makes no sense to overload / to mean both regular and integer division.

With that reasoning, assembly shouldn't be possible to write correctly.

In other words, because I'm not dumb?

I'm not saying you will write nonsense, I'm asking what evidence you have. The evidence in this case is "I know what I'm doing".

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