Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

151–152 of 152 posts

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#151

Post by marvy » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 2:02 AM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #150

marvy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me try to make hexane360's point more explicitly: Imagine a hypothetical universe where all Haskell books are equally good, but some are more popular than others (maybe they have well known authors, or catchy titles, or are available for free online, or something). In particular, imagine Haskell Book Number 7 (HB#7 for short) gets 99% "market share". Then if someone says "most people who gave up on Haskell used t…

I see what you're saying, and it makes some sense. As you say, though, LYAH is almost certainly not at 99% market share. It's definitely not at the 100% market share HTML has in Web development. The universe is too complex to design a statistically-valid study for everything you want to know (though I definitely understand the urge to do that). At the end of the day, anecdotal evidence may not be great, but it's ofte…

> better than nothing, [which is sometimes the only other option]

True. The trick is to sort of mentally keep track of how much better than nothing it is, so you know which pieces of anecdotal evidence you can trust with only 40% confidence, and which you can trust with something more like 90%.

But yeah, definitely WAY better than nothing.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#152

Post by FearNotDaniel » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 3:41 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #6

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #2

I tried LYAH before I had any real functional experience, and it went poorly. I think I wasn't dedicated enough. I took a programming languages class taught in Racket, and by the end of that semester I felt like I had finally "gotten" what functional programming was all about. Tried LYAH again and... it still didn't quite stick. Not sure why. But I was determined, because I'd heard about Haskell so much on the intern…

> I'm not sure why LYAH wasn't good for me, when it's touted as being a great starting place It's not. It's a terrible starting resource. Majority of people I anecdotally hear gave up on Haskell seem to mention LYAH. Yes the material is there, but it's not presented in a way that generally sticks and fits pieces together. I guarantee someone will reply to this thread and say it worked for them, but in general people…

I had a very similar experience with the "Poignant Guide To Ruby" back in the day. It had an enormous cult following, it's a charming piece of programming-themed art, and probably did a lot to encourage people to want to learn the language, but I found it wasn't actually very practical as a tool for learning.

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