[Haskell-cafe] Re: Getting my feet wet - not in Haskell though

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> (There's still no good introduction to Monads, for example. One that's
> understandable for a programmer who knows his Dijkstra well but no
> category theory. And a few other things.)

I grasped this one first time round:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monads_as_containers

No category theory. A basic understanding of apples and boxes is all
that is required.

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monad has a list of about 10, plus
pretty much every book/general tutorial introduces Monad's as well. If
there is really nothing out there that helps you understand, you might
want to prod some authors as to what isn't clear/understandable.

And Haskell let's you serialise thunks just fine (use Yhc), but really
if thats what you want to do, I think you are going to suffer a lot in
the long run... I have written client/server app's before, the whole
point is you want to decide what computation gets performed on which
side, not leave it up to the vagaries of lazy evaluation to come up
with a random solution.

Haskell is fun, Haskell is good, but its not the right answer to every
question. Just have fun doing whatever you do :) If at the end you
wrote up a little summary of your project, what you used, how it went,
what issues you ran into - then perhaps people can tell you (with the
benefit of hindsight) how Haskell might have been.

Thanks

Neil