Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

learnyouahaskell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 152 posts

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#81

Post by aye01 »

ilovecaching wrote: post #59
anon335dtzbvc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies." Well it's fine for beginners, because beginners want easy explanations and many examples to start with, instead of very precise definitions which requires a precise math vocabulary.

Graham has simple and precise definitions. They're not mutually exclusive properties. No mathematical background or vocabulary is required to read Grahams book. The book is used in introductory computer science courses for undergraduate freshman.

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.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#84

Post by protomikron »

aye01 wrote: post #81
ilovecaching wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graham has simple and precise definitions. They're not mutually exclusive properties. No mathematical background or vocabulary is required to read Grahams book. The book is used in introductory computer science courses for undergraduate freshman.

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.

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.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#85

Post by ilovecaching »

aye01 wrote: post #81
ilovecaching wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graham has simple and precise definitions. They're not mutually exclusive properties. No mathematical background or vocabulary is required to read Grahams book. The book is used in introductory computer science courses for undergraduate freshman.

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.

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.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#86

Post by lolive »

I won't comment the book. But my personal feeling is that you need a working environment first. And for that, you need to follow the advice at this resource: https://medium.com/@dogwith1eye/setting-up-haskell-in-vs-cod... with my comment (cf Olivier Rossel). If you are under Ubuntu, forget about the brew paragraph. Just curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh

After all that, you will have an editor that can run/debug some Haskell.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#87

Post by myegorov »

andrepd wrote: post #72
ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

Agreed. Personally I hate these kinds of books. This style, long-winded "cheery" explanations, constantly "playful", as if I was a small child that couldn't hold my attention for 2 minutes before you had to dangle a colourful toy in front of me. Like they're afraid to be serious for a moment (so many exclamation marks). I'm not here for humour, or to have a pleasant conversation. I'm here to learn. Just give me clear…

I suspect few physics students would agree with you about the didactic value of LL. The audiences for the two types of books couldn't be more different.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#88

Post by ilovecaching »

creichert wrote: post #79
ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

> Terrible book. Definitely overstated and not good advice for beginners. My advice to beginners would be: - Read all the Haskell books available at your disposal. (In addition to LYAH and the Hutton book, I would say Learning Haskell From First Principles and Get Programming with Haskell are great, https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-haskell , http://haskellbook.com/ ) - When you hit something that do…

Beginners want a clear place to start learning from. All those things you said are overwhelming and unnecessary. Some of your recommendations would be fine as next steps, but to start with, just read Hutton's book. It is small enough to be read in just a few days.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#89

Post by ilovecaching »

jbritton wrote: post #65
ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

Personally, I found LYAH to be a great book. If there are places where the book is incorrect, I didn't have the background knowledge to notice. I felt the book did a good job explaining applicatives and monads by starting at the very basics and very slowly ramping up the complexity to a complete understanding. I know with many math books I have had a problem where some transformation morphs equation A into equation B…

Have you read Hutton's book?

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#90

Post by sriram_sun »

andrepd wrote: post #72
ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

Agreed. Personally I hate these kinds of books. This style, long-winded "cheery" explanations, constantly "playful", as if I was a small child that couldn't hold my attention for 2 minutes before you had to dangle a colourful toy in front of me. Like they're afraid to be serious for a moment (so many exclamation marks). I'm not here for humour, or to have a pleasant conversation. I'm here to learn. Just give me clear…

Can be cheery, playful and concise - The Little Schemer was a pleasure to read cover to cover.
Post reply on HN