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I am still far from being a professor, but I recently got a glimpse of what awaits you in that role…

From: Sebastian R. <…@gmail.com>

To: joachim@cis.upenn.edu

Subject: re: Errors

I’ve spotted a basic error in your course on Haskell (https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/). Before I proceed, it’s cool if you’re not receptive to errors being indicated; I’ve come across a number of professors who would rather take offense than admit we’re all human and thus capable of making mistakes… My goal is to find a resource that might be useful well into the future, and a good indicator of that is how responsive the author is to change.

In your introduction note you have written:

n contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of “the language”. But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined – it just happens to be the standard library.

Howeverm there is no input CodeWorld in the code above. Have you been made aware of this error earlier?

Regards, …

Nice. I like when people learn from my lectures. The introduction is a bit werid, but ok, maybe this guy had some bad experiences.

Strangley, I don’t see a mistake in the material, so I respond:

From: Joachim Breitner joachim@cis.upenn.edu

To: Sebastian R. <…@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: Errors

Dear Sebastian,

thanks for pointing out errors. But the first piece of code under “Basic Haskell” starts with

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
import CodeWorld

so I am not sure what you are referring to.

Note that these are lecture notes, so you have to imagine a lecturer editing code live on stage along with it. If you only have the notes, you might have to infer a few things.

Regards, Joachim

A while later, I receive this response:

From: Sebastian R. <…@gmail.com>

To: Joachim Breitner joachim@cis.upenn.edu

Subject: Re: Errors

Greetings, Joachim.

Kindly open the lecture slides and search for “input CodeWorld” to find the error; it is not in the code, but in the paragraph that implicitly refers back to the code.

You might note that I quoted this precisely from the lectures… and so I repeat myself… this came from your lectures; they’re not my words!

In contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of “the language”. But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined – it just happens to be the standard library.

This time around, I’ve highlighted the issue. I hope that made it easier for you to spot…

Nonetheless, I got my answer. Don’t reply if you’re going to fight tooth and nail about such a basic fix; it’s simply a waste of both of our time. I’d rather learn from somewhere else…

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 11:19 PM, Joachim Breitner joachim@cis.upenn.edu wrote:

…

I am a bit reminded of Sean Spicer … “they’re not my words!” … but clearly I am missing something. And indeed I am: In the code snippet, I wrote – correctly – import CodeWorld, but in the text I had input CodeWorld. I probably did write LaTeX before writing the lecture notes. Well, glad to have that sorted out. I fixed the mistake and wrote back:

From: Joachim Breitner joachim@cis.upenn.edu

To: Sebastian R. <…@gmail.com>

Betreff: Re: Errors

Dear Sebastian,

nobody is fighting, and I see the mistake now: The problem is not that the line is not in the code, the problem is that there is a typo in the line and I wrote “input” instead of “import”.

Thanks for the report, although you did turn it into quite a riddle… a simple “you wrote import when it should have been import” would have been a better user of both our time.

Regards, Joachim

Am Donnerstag, den 03.08.2017, 13:32 +1000 schrieb Sebastian R.:

…

(And it seems I now made the inverse typo, writing “import“ instead of “input”. Anyways, I did not think of this any more until a few days later, when I found this nice message in my mailbox:

From: Sebastian R. <…@gmail.com>

To: Joachim Breitner joachim@cis.upenn.edu

Subject: Re: Errors

a simple “you wrote import when it should have been import” would have been a better user of both our time.

We’re both programmers. How about I cut ALL of the unnecessary garbage and just tell you to s/import/input/ on that last quotation (the thing immediately before this paragraph, in case you didn’t know).

I blatantly quoted the error, like this:

In your introduction note you have written:

n contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of “the language”. But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined – it just happens to be the standard library.

Howeverm there is no input CodeWorld in the code above.

Since that apparently wasn’t clear enough, in my second email to you I had to highlight it like so:

You might note that I quoted this precisely from the lectures… and so I repeat myself… this came from your lectures; they’re not my words!

In contrast to a classical intro into Haskell, we do not start with numbers, booleans, tuples, lists and strings, but we start with pictures. These are of course library-defined (hence the input CodeWorld) and not part of “the language”. But that does not make them less interesting, and in fact, even the basic boolean type is library defined – it just happens to be the standard library.

This time around, I’ve highlighted the issue. I hope that made it easier for you to spot…

I’m not sure if you’re memeing at me or not now, but it seems either your reading comprehension, or your logical deduction skills might be substandard. Unfortunately, there isn’t much either of us can do about that, so I’m happy to accept that some people will be so stupid; after all, it’s to be expected and if we don’t accept that which is to be expected then we live our lives in denial.

Happy to wrap up this discusson here, Seb…

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 12:22 AM, Joachim Breitner joachim@cis.upenn.edu wrote:

…

Well, I chose to be amused by this, and I am sharing my amusement with you.