Functional Baby Talk: Analysis of Code Fragments from Novice Haskell Programmers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes 161,000 interactions from novice Haskell programmers to identify common errors and behaviors, providing insights to improve educational tools for teaching functional programming.

Contribution

It presents a large-scale analysis of novice Haskell errors and behaviors, offering recommendations for enhancing beginner code evaluation environments.

Findings

Parenthesis mismatches are common among novices.

Lexical scoping errors frequently occur.

Do block misunderstandings are prevalent.

Abstract

What kinds of mistakes are made by novice Haskell developers, as they learn about functional programming? Is it possible to analyze these errors in order to improve the pedagogy of Haskell? In 2016, we delivered a massive open online course which featured an interactive code evaluation environment. We captured and analyzed 161K interactions from learners. We report typical novice developer behavior; for instance, the mean time spent on an interactive tutorial is around eight minutes. Although our environment was restricted, we gain some understanding of Haskell novice errors. Parenthesis mismatches, lexical scoping errors and do block misunderstandings are common. Finally, we make recommendations about how such beginner code evaluation environments might be enhanced.