[Haskell-beginners] Re: [Haskell-cafe] The problem with Monads...

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 07:51 -0800, Jonathan Cast wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 12:56 -0200, Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira Pinto
> wrote:
> > 
> > Last night I was thinking on what makes monads so hard to take, and
> > came to a conclusion: the lack of a guided tour on the implemented
> > monads.
> 
> ...
> 
> > Inspired by the paper "Functional Programming with Overloading and
> > Higher-Order Polymorphism",
> >         Mark P Jones
> > (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/springschool.html)
> >           Advanced School of Functional Programming, 1995.
> > 
> > SO WHAT?
> 
> So have you read Jones' paper?  Or do you have a *concrete* explanation
> of how it differs from your desired `guided tour'?
> 

We really shouldn't be expecting people to read papers as documentation
for standard libraries these days, however good they are. Like it or
not, most people find papers intimidating and the file formats are
non-standard for documentation (I can't be the only one who hates most
PDF docs, and most windows users wouldn't know where to start finding a
postscript viewer!).

Moving some of the info into the docs is a good idea. Doubly so as the
community's common pool of ideas has often moved on since the original
paper and much more accessible documentation can now be written.

On another note, perhaps there should be a note up somewhere asking
people not to cross-post between -beginners and -cafe? People on -cafe
don't realising they're responding to a beginner request, losing much of
the point of having -beginners.

-- 
Philippa Cowderoy <flippa at flippac.org>