[Haskell-cafe] Explaining monads

[Andy Gimblett]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 05:53:05PM -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
>
> For what it's worth, the nature of Haskell is such that you do (at
> least currently) have to spend a lot of time reading research papers
> to understand what's going on.  Maybe that will change sometime, but
> probably not soon.  This ties in to the open-endedness of Haskell; I
> sometimes think that really understanding all of Haskell is like
> really understanding all of mathematics.  This is frustrating, but
> it's also what makes the language so rewarding.  I guess what I'm
> saying is: get used to it, it's not so bad.

At AngloHaskell, one of Phillipa's slides referred to Haskell as a
"programming language theory gateway drug" - and was clearly of the
opinion that this was A Good Thing.

-- 
Andy Gimblett
Computer Science Department
University of Wales Swansea
http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~csandy/