Learn You a Haskell is Problematic

A couple of years ago I learned Haskell and to do that I read a book that is universally recommended for beginners and used to be available free online called “Learn you a Haskell for Great Good”.

The website seems to be gone at the moment: https://www.learnyouahaskell.com/

I didn’t think too much about it when I read it but after some other people were asking what they should use to learn Haskell I remembered these weird ‘jokes’ that are in the book to make the code a bit livelier.

Judging from the reviews online not that many people (in this case almost only men) have picked up on this. To be clear, it’s in extremely poor judgement to have picked these slurs in the first place and maybe you could get away with this stuff 5-10 years ago, that’s no longer the case.

I’ve screenshotted the examples below. There must be better books to learn Haskell with by now. I quickly switched to Clojure quickly for a bunch of reasons and you might do well not to take the detour that I did.

A really badly chosen and phrased BMI calculator
Not even clear what the point of this slur is
Is this a joke? Does the author have a girlfriend?

There could be more but I think you get the point.

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