[mprovost]

This is great and a lot of it rings true to my experience writing a book to teach Rust. It's basically a giant topological sorting exercise to find the optimal order to introduce syntax so that you steer clear of rabbit holes. Or you just end up drawing the owl.

For example, to implement a simple "hello world" program in Rust you have to use a macro (println!), so you can't even look for a function signature in the standard library docs to help. So you can either just say "don't worry about this for now, just trust me" or spend a whole chapter diving into macro syntax. The number of concepts you need to implement a basic program is pretty large and you could easily spend a chapter going into any of them.

Personally I'm not a fan of the approach in this post to just "lie" to people but I do find myself showing a non-optimal implementation because that's all the syntax I've introduced up to that point. Then later I show how to do it better. I know some readers just want the final answer up front though.

[glynnormington]

I provide a dependency diagram so students can work out where to apply most effort and how to catch up if they miss something.

I also show likely dependencies from the course assessment to the various topics. For instance, there is a strong dependency on the IO monad, but a weaker/optional dependency on (general) monads.

In terms of presentation order, I tend to over-simplify early in the course and circle back and make things more precise later.

(I'm teaching a 2nd year university course on Functional Programming with Haskell for the first time, so I found the OP fascinating. Thanks!)