LYAH

This is a fork of Learn You A Haskell For Great Good, which is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 by Miran Lipovača.

I've converted the HTML to markdown with Pandoc since I couldn't find any source code for the original book.

Why I'm doing this

LYAH isn't perfect, but it's got a fairly good/cute approach to learning. The problem is, it's full of pretty offensive crap that can easily turn people off of learning Haskell, and I personally want Haskell to grow a large and diverse development community, and that requires being welcoming and friendly to everyone.

Why not just write a new book from scratch? Well, I'm not qualified. And there are other people who are. So why not just wait for them to finish, and start advocating those new, better books? Because LYAH has a very entrenched position in the Haskell community, and even if better books come along, it will probably still be referenced a lot. So I would like to provide pretty much the same experience as LYAH minus all the stupid crap. Maybe if this comes along enough it will be able to effectively replace LYAH.

What's so bad about LYAH?

Some of the stuff in LYAH is actually hurtful (like the BMI calculator example, which literally insults people based on their weight. Seriously. What the hell.), some is just stupid ("BOOBIES" on the calculator), and some just subtly reinforces the non-diverse status quo (gendered language/assumptions). The goal is to get this to be something that most people would actually be fine giving to their small children, since that's the aesthetic (if not the content) of the book.

I'm not going to justify every single change that's made in this fork. And if you feel that something should be changed, please submit a PR and I'm very likely to happily merge it, unless it makes the content less respectful.

Can I help?

Yes, please! I really don't have time to work on this project, but I got mad enough that I started it. I have a TODO list below; please feel free to submit a PR for anything you find!

TODO:

• review for sexist/racist/demeaning stuff
• get rid of all sexist/racist/demeaning stuff
• get rid of the remainder of HTML cruft in the markdown files
• automate building to an HTML site
• automate building a pretty HTML site
• publish somewhere
• choose a new name so it's identifiably different

Non-exhaustive list of stuff to replace

• bmi example (syntax-in-functions)
• ~~"gayballs" (higher-order-functions)~~
• guys
• man
• girlfriend (input-and-output)
• "BOOBIES" calculator (functionally-solving-problems)
• "Writer? I hardly know her!"
• gang example (for-a-few-monads-more), along with pictures of villains, and gun stuff.

In addition to these things, it'd be great to be more proactive about diversity and respect. Replacing or adding some pictures representing more diverse people in a non-stereotyping way would be great.