underlap, 2 months ago

2/3 I then set them an exercise and more than one of them chose to do it the hard way. When I showed them my trivial solution, they were shocked.

underlap, 2 months ago

3/3 It seems that they are used to writing a fair bit of code, e.g. in C#, to achieve anything useful. I need to help them unlearn this habit.

pmidden, 2 months ago

@underlap could also be thoughts about premature optimization. I see this very often with novice programmers (of any language).

yplog, 2 months ago

@underlap Changing habits in functional programming can be challenging for beginners. Two books that have been very helpful for me in this process:

• Simplicity - Taming Complex Software With Functional Thinking by Eric Normand
• Functional Programming by Michał Płachta.

underlap, 2 months ago

@yplog @pmidden Some data structure and (easy) monad exercises for my functional programming students today.

A few times I heard the remark "Oh, so you just have to ..." when a student was surprised by the simplicity of the code involved.

I hope they internalise the feeling of really grokking a problem and coding up a neat solution (in whatever language). We'll make programmers of them yet...

#Haskell #SoftwareDevelopment