Re: Eclipse

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From: Tony Finch
Subject: Re: Eclipse
Date: 17:21 on 27 Oct 2006
On Fri, 27 Oct 2006, Hakim Cassimally wrote:
>
> this seems to afflict the Haskell community, who write books full of
> very pretty "->" symbols and various other mathematical things, all of
> which you *don't actually use* when writing haskell source.

I was recently reading this paper
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/SevenDeadlySins.pdf
which has a few good points, but in one respect is seriously misguided. It
proposes that introductory programming languages should use less confusing
symbols, such as U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN instead of * and U+2190 LEFT
ARROW for assignment. Never mind the fact that it's a struggle to even
type the things, and that it's missing an opportunity to teach the poor
dears about the arbitrariness and generally bad design of programming
languages.

Tony.
-- 
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