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Haskell, Vectors, and Implicit Knowledge

Betsy Haibel on January 03, 2019

Hey folks! This piece is a few years old now, but I'm republishing it on dev.to as I move more of my stuff here. It's kind of personal. Unlike a ...
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Jan van Brügge • Edited

Have you tried "Haskell from first Principle"?
I really like getting the first impressions of others on Haskell. For me it is hard to estimate what parts are hard to understand for other beginners if I did not had a problem with it (or forgot that I did). This probably obvious in my Haskell by example series

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DrBearhands

This piece is a few years old now

I'm curious what your current thoughts are on this experience in particular and Haskell in general.

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Betsy Haibel

I still think that it's educational malpractice to assume nontrivial working knowledge of a different, unrelated* field without highlighting that assumption for the reader.

(* "unrelated": yes, Haskell is "math-y," but category theory and linear algebra are not closely related.)

On Haskell in general? In theory I like the concision and abstraction-friendliness it enables, but its affordances for prying open those abstractions and observing how data flows through a system are pretty bad. I think if it were more tooling-friendly, and if that tooling provided strong observability, I would like it a lot; but as is, I'd rather program in languages that optimize for faster programmer feedback loops.