A Type of Programming

As it is the only reason I would have for continuing is that I already wanted to read it. But “it’s a book about programming” is not much of a sales pitch.

I guess if you love the style that is the reason to continue?

Scrolling to the end, a better title might be “An Introduction to Haskell” and you need to provide your email address to read more than the first few pages.

Sigh.

I find the grandiosity hard to resist (“a whole type of programming, wow, sounds neat!”) but the author really seems to want to take us for a ride first.

Edit: After he takes your email he asks for 5 euros to get access. Scammy.

seanmcdirmid• 7 years ago

Maybe it is an introduction to programming using types? I read some of the text, but I couldn’t figure out if this was really the spin or not.

gjm11• 7 years ago

Wow. "Sign up to read more. You will have immediate access ...", followed by an enter-your-email box. Do that and you immediately hit a paywall. No "immediate access" for you.

That's ouright fraudulent, and I'm flagging this submission for it.

smitty1e2• 7 years ago

Is is a paywall? It looked as though one could opt not to pay a thing.

I'll come back when I'm ready to pay.

kolektiv2• 7 years ago

Yup, also annoyed by the dark pattern. To add insult to injury, below $20, it removes the option to pay with a card, and only allows bitcoin - interesting approach to tax, perhaps! Whatever the reason, I don't use bitcoin, and even if I wasn't already annoyed by the bait and switch, I wouldn't be bothered jumping through so many hoops. What a shame, the content looked as if it might be good, but no chance of me giving money with that level of disrespect for the reader.

AnthonBerg2• 7 years ago

Interesting! So I’m not the author, just the submitter. No relation to the author.

I understand how you see the payment/signup process. However it didn’t even occur to me that people approaching the site would see it that way :) I found it engaging and charming with a haze of mystery. There’s a useful lesson here.

I’m 100% confident the author doesn’t mean to defraud anyone at all, in the slightest.

As I find the contents speak quite deeply to me, may I ask you to see how the author responds and reevaluate? I think this is first and foremost a labor of love and humanistic ambition.

k00017• 7 years ago

Hi, I'm the author of the book. Thanks for your input :)

The book is not free, this is not a paywall, and it's not a subscription: You are buying early access to the book so that you can start reading it before I am finished writing it. As soon as the book is complete, you also get an official digital copy of the entire book (PDF, mobi, epub, etc). The book is growing quite rapidly, it's currently over 50000 words covering many topics, so far mostly related to type-level reasoning. I will be adding a table of contents soon.

Lorkki• 7 years ago

The way you present things at the footer does makes it sound like you're simply asking for an email subscription. It might help to be more open, ie. "this book is a work in progress", and to display the price before asking for contact details.

p1necone• 7 years ago

Flagged - I know complaining about paywalls is against the rules, but this is not a regular paywall - this is a scummy "lemme add you to my mailing list and only then will you find out I also want money" kind of paywall. (According to other commenters, I'm not willing to enter my email.)

In case the author is reading - I actually quite like this "first chapter free" shareware model of book sales, it's just the misdirection I take offense to.

Also if you're asking for peoples email addresses please be up front about all of the reasons you want them.

k00017• 7 years ago

Thanks for your input. The email address is so that you can login afterwards, whenever there are new book chapters to be read. I'll clarify this, thanks!

pliftkl• 7 years ago

I really enjoyed reading the first chapter, and I was looking forward to purchasing the book, but like others, I'm really turned off by your purchase process. Entering email and getting to a payment page where the easy ways to pay disappear below 20 EUR is really, really annoying. If you were to fix the purchase process and publish some sort of chapter outline of your book, I'd almost certainly purchase a copy.

sridca• 7 years ago

Previous discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/bbjq1o/a_type_of_p...

kwhitefoot• 7 years ago

Could do with an executive summary at the top so that one doesn't have to wade through a lot of text to find out what the document is for.

A Type of Programming

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