[Haskell-beginners] How Haskell Fits Into an Operating System / API Environment

[Kelleher, Kevin]

I have had the same frustration. It feels like you're learning a foreign language
that doesn't have any vocabulary for walking directions, prices, or ordering food.
So, while you could discuss philosophy, say, you wouldn't be able to ask for a
drink of water, or how to find the bathroom.

I do believe there is a payoff to studying Haskell, and I do keep plugging away,
rather inconstantly.  It's difficult, because I don't really have the time now,
but hopefully I can devote some of an upcoming vacation to make what I
know of Haskell finally touch the ground.

Kevin

From: Beginners [mailto:beginners-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Tetley
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2013 11:45 AM
To: The Haskell-Beginners Mailing List - Discussion of primarily beginner-level topics related to Haskell
Subject: Re: [Haskell-beginners] How Haskell Fits Into an Operating System / API Environment

I tend to see OO subtyping and heterogeneous collections as more an impediment to (pure) functional integration with the "rest-of-the-world" than state. There are a lot of quality wrappers to stateful C libraries from Haskell, but few to object oriented C++ or Objective C libraries.

On 11 August 2013 16:10, Philippe Sismondi <psismondi at arqux.com<mailto:psismondi at arqux.com>> wrote:


As a result of this little thread I have come to another conclusion, and this is just my subjective view. Most of the software that I am interested in seems to live most comfortably with a stateful conception of the world. (The native libraries I find most useful certainly are stateful.) I am reasonably competent with monads and monad transformers in Haskell. But, to be honest, after three years of pluggin away at Haskell, I am not the least convinced that the problem of handling a changing external world in a pure functional language has been successfully solved by those techniques. I always feel as though I am using the robot arm on a space shuttle when a screwdriver would do. (Again, no need to rebut this - I may be wrong or just to stupid to use Haskell effectively - so be it.)

Perhaps in the end I do not really believe that functional programming is the panacea that its devotees claim it to be.

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