<blockquote> There were a reasonable amount of typo and similar errors I seem to recall now actually, which is either surprising or perhaps revealing given that it was publicly reviewed.</blockquote>
A lot of people with Ph.D.s in Computer Science provided "comments" on the book, but did not necessarily review the whole book. Reviewing a book cover to cover takes time. I found a lot of academic mistakes in Real World Haskell, such as the fact they used the phrase "strong typing" which has pretty much been banned from academic programming language literature thanks to Benjamin Pierce's book Types and Programming Language, where Pierce says he reviewed tons of papers trying to decipher a common meaning for the phrase and couldn't. A better way to characterize a type system is by whether it is (a) sound (b) complete.
There were just too many examples in Real World Haskell where it could've been much better explained, especially considering the authors CVs.
A lot of people with Ph.D.s in Computer Science provided "comments" on the book, but did not necessarily review the whole book. Reviewing a book cover to cover takes time. I found a lot of academic mistakes in Real World Haskell, such as the fact they used the phrase "strong typing" which has pretty much been banned from academic programming language literature thanks to Benjamin Pierce's book Types and Programming Language, where Pierce says he reviewed tons of papers trying to decipher a common meaning for the phrase and couldn't. A better way to characterize a type system is by whether it is (a) sound (b) complete.
There were just too many examples in Real World Haskell where it could've been much better explained, especially considering the authors CVs.