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Comment by cursork | Hacker News Reader

LYAH is a chore. I got nowhere with it - it is tedious. After a cursory glance a few of us at my company are working through The Little MLer in Haskell instead. It seems to really be focussing on types and I think those kind of core concepts are important to grasp at the early stages.

More importantly, the Little Schemer and The Little MLer are aimed at non-programmers... yet programmers struggle with them. We should question why that is.

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Just to counter-signal the general negativity bias of internet comments on anything popular:

I liked Learn You A Haskell a lot.

Yup, I didn't mean to open a negativity fest. It's a double edged sword with the shallow examples (e.g. calculating BMI). LYAH does a very good job of explaining every single detail in those lines of code, I've never left an example confused but at the same time the simplicity keeps you from having questions you want to explore.

I don't think this is a bad thing. In any mathematics class I ever excelled in I spent a lot of time mindlessly executing the mechanics and knowing the names and pieces that were relevant, once I knew all that it became very easy to see the interpretations and the applications.

I think I'll finish LYAH before doing one of these more application oriented tutorials.

To ameliorate my point; I use LYAH as a reference piece a lot. It's well written and is a really takes time over many subjects. I mostly wanted to make (badly!) a point that there are resources out there that will push experienced and non-experienced alike. And they don't need to be in the language you're looking to learn right now.

Either way - I hope to give Write Yourself a Scheme... a go sometime soon. Looks good.

A lot of programmers are so indoctrinated in the imperative programming model that a language like Scheme and the approach of the Little LISPer (I will always think of it by that title) hurts their brain upon first exposure. The less curious of them will say "this is stupid" and go back to their familiar world of Python or Ruby.

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