This reminds me that when I was interested in learning haskell I was completely put off by their "introduction" page on their homepage. It was a couple of years ago but it doesn't seem to have changed much:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction
It looks like a very pretentious sales pitch to me. You have quotes like "Writing large software systems that work is difficult and expensive. [...] Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, can make it easier and cheaper." and a whole bunch of very vague and poorly backed up assertions.
After a couple of paragraphs brainwashing you about how good functional programming is, you finally get to some code. The first code you get is (of all things) a quicksort which is not used as an introduction to the language but as a way to boast that haskell is so much better and more expressive than C. I mean, look at that C code just after it, disgusting isn't it.
What they don't say is how much slower their implementation is, of course. They also give a link to a more direct (and faster) C-to-haskell version of the quicksort[1]. Hey, it's actually longer than the C version! And it uses 3 imports. And it's still slower than the original C. Oops. I wonder why they didn't put that one in the tutorial. I went back to common lisp after that, I have yet to write 1 line of haskell.
TL;DR: when I want an introduction to your language, I want to know what I can do with it and how I can do it. Give me some code to chew on, show off some features. Don't spend 10 pages telling me you're the best of the best and everything else is crap. This is the kind of article I expect: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html
[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction/Direct_Trans...
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction
It looks like a very pretentious sales pitch to me. You have quotes like "Writing large software systems that work is difficult and expensive. [...] Functional programming languages, such as Haskell, can make it easier and cheaper." and a whole bunch of very vague and poorly backed up assertions.
After a couple of paragraphs brainwashing you about how good functional programming is, you finally get to some code. The first code you get is (of all things) a quicksort which is not used as an introduction to the language but as a way to boast that haskell is so much better and more expressive than C. I mean, look at that C code just after it, disgusting isn't it.
What they don't say is how much slower their implementation is, of course. They also give a link to a more direct (and faster) C-to-haskell version of the quicksort[1]. Hey, it's actually longer than the C version! And it uses 3 imports. And it's still slower than the original C. Oops. I wonder why they didn't put that one in the tutorial. I went back to common lisp after that, I have yet to write 1 line of haskell.
TL;DR: when I want an introduction to your language, I want to know what I can do with it and how I can do it. Give me some code to chew on, show off some features. Don't spend 10 pages telling me you're the best of the best and everything else is crap. This is the kind of article I expect: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html
[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction/Direct_Trans...