A woman learning Haskell

The newest entry in our "Look at that Haskell idiot and laugh". It's a woman that writes an angry rant because she couldn't remember that... vector product is anti-commutative.

http://betsyhaibel.com/blog/2016-04-29-haskell-vectors-and-implicit-knowledge/

Problem 10 took me a month.
They thought it was too simple to explain. They thought that anyone learning Haskell would have retained all the random topics that are contained in high school precalculus. They thought that anyone learning Haskell would be the Kind Of Person who just “naturally” remembers that sort of stuff.
This could be a rant about the arrogance of the functional programming ivory tower.

Yep, you've seen it: high school pre-calculus is officially "arrogance" of the functional "ivory tower". But there is more: she actually feels that the Haskell community hates her:

Real World Haskell assumes that all truly educated people remember vector-math intricacies off the top of their heads.

Intricacies, ahahahaha! Remembering one of the most basic operations in vector algebra is an "intricacy" now!

I think Haskell is a really pretty language, but I can’t tell if the Haskell community wants me.

Oooh, the discrimination!!! They've included an exercise in a book that she wasted a month solving! The oppression!

It’s still cruel.

I couldn't solve an exercise in a book! Goodbye, cruel world!

And when we encode that cruelty into our educational materials – however accidentally – we turn surviving that cruelty into something we value above all.

Oooh, the evil patriarchy embedding cruelty into geometric problems! And vector product was invented by a man! It's all those evil men, we should cut their balls off!!!

>>1

My old boss had compared its “offbeat” approach to _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, which I love.

Ahahaha, everyone who likes _why's piece of shit would do most good to the world if converted to fertilizer.

Anyway, she made two mistakes:

First of all, gave up when her code using Data.Vector as if it were the other Vector failed to compile. When your code fails to compile "with weird arity errors" it means that you fundamentally misunderstand something. When you fundamentally misunderstand something, you don't be, "oh well, I guess I'll try another way", you keep hitting your head against that wall until you understand what you've misunderstood.

Yes, in this day and age you can't have a perfect understanding of your programming environment down to the transistor level. You build on top of abstractions, and even those abstractions you don't usually understand completely. But there's a huge difference between having an incomplete understanding that's possibly incorrect in some corner cases (you don't know which if any), but otherwise works perfectly fine for you, and knowing for sure that you misunderstand something fundamental about this reproducible case.

That "randomly adding and subtracting @s and colons and quotation marks until it works" she saw beginners do is OK for a person who has literally wrote her first hello world a couple of months ago. When you become a professional programmer you gotta get the professional attitude toward your tools: you're supposed to master them, and whenever it turns out that you have not, you don't rest until you correct that.

The second mistake was, of course, not asking google. When you see a weird thing like a compilation error and after trying some things you figure that you don't have a clue what's going on, you go and search google, stackoverflow etc for similar problems. If that doesn't help you go and ask on irc, stackoverflow, reddit, etc. Also, your coworkers and friends.

If that's an algorithm that you want to train your algorithm-making abilities on, then of course you bang your head for a while, but when you realize that it's much harder than it was supposed to be, so you must be missing something vital, you go and ask google and so on. You don't fuck with it for a fucking month, man.

Btw it's not the first time I've seen a chick in programming have this weird attitude, as if trying to live up to some idiotic Manly Male Real Programmer standard. And then she blames that Haskell book for setting the bar too high, like you're expected to have known linear algebra off the top of your head, otherwise get back to the kitchen.

No, silly, you were expected to google, good programmers google constantly and are not afraid to ask questions. That retarded manliness thing exists entirely in your imagination and is quite annoying, frankly, especially when you start blaming real people for your self-inflicted harm.