1. spelt flour contains gluten
2. honey is chemically the same thing as table sugar, and also contains exorbitant amounts of fructose

sugar is sugar

try removing all sugar and grains for a month, I’d bet my left arm that you would start dropping pounds like soap bars

If anything, that labeling has to come from a third party, but that means that you have to discover that third party first, and hope that their suggestions help your learning.

The point is: if you want prioritize learning, you need to go to a place where learning is prioritized for you, for instance a Haskell course at university. (The problem with the latter is, of course, that access to these is fairly limited.) Or maybe buy LAYH and RWH.

In other words, there is no magical fairy that prioritizes the culture specifically for each beginner and their needs. And if there were, it wouldn’t be a magical fairy, but just another website / learning resource in the vast realm of Haskell.

When you start learning a large, new body of knowledge, it helps to have tools to *prioritize* that learning. The mathematically sophisticated stuff is beautiful, but it’s not the right place to *start* unless you have a particular background coming in.

The people doing theoretical stuff in an academic context often write for their peers, and assume a particular background and a particular set of goals. But as the haskell community grows, it’s acquiring members with more varied backgrounds and goals, and that makes communicating about those things more important.

The tone of the article would indicate that this supposition is erroneous, thus I assume Thompson actually meant to put the emphasis and contrast on ‘me,’ with alternatives being “for logicians” or “for type theoreticians.”

As such, I would say there’s more homework to be done to understand Monads than Pointers in C.

Pointers in C are a far more difficult idea to grasp than Monads.

I tried to come up with something, but no matter what I try, I always end up with Haskell, only with a bit different syntax. You see, to have polymorphic functions, you have to have Hindley–Milner type system. Once you have that in place you’d certainly like to have some morphisms on types. Thus, you’ll end up with having Monads. From there on, it’s very short trip to full blown Haskell.

Still, if you can come up with something that is pure FP (no cheating here like in Clean!), but without Monads (or equivalent burden!), I’d like to hear from you.

A lot of people, media personalities, most fans, and especially front offices of teams, have wrong ideas about what makes teams win. This was shown conclusively by Dave Berri in his books “The Wages of Wins” and “Stumbling on Wins.” Basketball is unique in sports in that the box score statistics do a good job of explaining wins and losses and player performance is stable over time. His systems aren’t designed to predict winners, but they are one of the best in existence for doing so.

I found it maddening that my Indiana Pacers continue to be mediocre when the information needed to win is readily available, and ignored. One of sports stats community set me straight. Instead of waiting for my team to win, I should find an inefficient basketball betting market, like the WNBA, look for mismatches between the market prediction and my prediction, and put some money on the line.

I didn’t do it. Okay? So first of all, let’s get that out of the way. And the person didn’t so much say that right out but imply it. But I learned my lesson. Learning Haskell for me isn’t about fixing the world, it’s about fixing myself and making stuff.

I don’t want my story to be this: I advocated and no one came and that totally bummed me out.

I want my story to be that I was right. I built stuff, and Haskell was a big force multiplier. The rest of the world kept doing things the hard way. That’s their loss.

Part of managing this challenge is understanding you’re not inferior. The brain is a muscle, it just takes time. The trap with Haskell is the usual moth-to-the-flame trap of many intellectual endeavors, familiar to mathematicians: Zealots get intoxicated with categorical formalizations that may or may not help develop the concise, powerful idioms we have long craved and dreamed for. Haskell is a fertile breeding ground for these idioms; the idioms themselves can be explained to high school students. Same in math, some people can actually reason better with extreme formality, but most students just need to learn powerful gut intuitions, working from example. The formalism comes last. Our brains are naturally wired to recognize patterns, we’re just terrible at describing these patterns in words to each other.

Go take a breather programming Scheme, then come back and program in a similar subset of Haskell. Haskell is the most beautiful functional language ever, if one can suppress these distracting pyschological reactions.