[Haskell-cafe] Re: Writing "Haskell For Dummies Or At Least For People Who Feel Like Dummies When They See The Word 'Monad'"

[Kirsten Chevalier]

On 12/13/06, Justin Bailey <jgbailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/12/06, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
> > Agreed.
> > Something along the lines of "The Art of Functional Programming".
>
> +1 . I would love to read something that is the equivalent of 'design
> patterns',  but for functional languages. I thought Osasaki's book "Purely
> Functional Data Structures" would have that, but it was little too focused
> on proving properties of algorithms. As someone in industry, that wasn't so
> important to me. I want to learn how to "think" functionally.
>

Check out this paper by Jeremy Gibbons, "Design Patterns as
Higher-Order Datatype-Generic Programs":
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/jeremy.gibbons/publications/index.html#hodgp

If you want to learn how to "think" functionally, forget you ever
heard the words "design pattern". There shouldn't be patterns in your
programs. If there are, that means that either your language isn't
providing you with enough abstractions or that you aren't using the
abstractions that are available (or possibly both).

Cheers,
Kirsten

--
Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier at alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt
"Anyone who spends their life on a computer is pretty unusual." -- Bill Gates