[Ur] Very interesting, but mind-exploding

[Sergey Mironov]

Dear Marcelo,
Equations you are talking about are really scary, but they are not
that important to start programming in Ur. I agree, that Appendix
would be a better place for them.
Here are some ideas which helped me to understand the syntax:
*) Explore Ur/Web standard library. It is in the urweb's sources,
lib/ur folder. lib/ur/basis.urs are the main one. Don't be afraid of
type signatures, look how those functions are used in tests and demos.
*) Ur tests are really handy. They are in the sources, tests/ folder
*) Check out existing projects:
http://dbpmail.net/essays/2013-05-21-literate-urweb-adventure.html is
a small but complete project so it is pretty nice to start with.
Mark's uwprocess library is very handy tool and an  excellent example
of employing FFI.
*) Write your own small project, use simpler subset of Ur/Web for
that. You may want to avoid type-level programming - datatypes,
constructors (con declarations), functions with type-level arguments
in [] (like fun f [typearg1] [typearg2] arg1 arg2 = ... ). Also
consider writing the project all-in-one-file for the first time.

Also, Ur\Web borrowed well-known concepts like Monad and Typeclasses
from Haskell, but the language itself is more like ML (and the main
part of the compiler is written in ML). So if you feel that you need
to learn the basics, try visiting http://mlton.org/ or other ML
resources.

Regards,
Sergey

2013/11/17 Marcelo de Moraes Serpa <celoserpa at gmail.com>:
> Hi!
>
> I've been checking out ur/web. There are some tutorials spread around, and I
> also checked the samples in the official site. I never really programmed in
> functional languages, having used Ruby for the last 5 yeasr. But I could
> grasp most of it.
>
> I did stumbled upon something that I wasn't expecting - the manual and the
> overwhelming math equations that start on page 20. That just killed my
> inspiration to go on :(
>
> That being said, I think this part would be better put in an Appendix or
> something like that, with additional text on what reference material would
> help understand it. The problem I see there is that the author is assuming
> the user knows this. Knowledge Syndrome anyone?
>
> This made me feel really, really dumb today. But at the same time, I'm
> willing to understand it now. I could use some help! Could someone point me
> to any material that would help me understand those equations? I mean, I
> have no idea how to make sense of them.
>
> As a last note -- author, please, consider having the humble non
> Phd/academic developer in mind. I know ur/web is "not for everyone", but the
> manual is just too scary as of now.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Marcelo.
>
>
>
>
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