[Haskell-cafe] IO is a bad example for Monads [was: do]

[Lennart Augustsson]

I agree with Dan here.

IO is important because you can't write any real program without using it.
So why not teach enough of it to get people off the ground straight away?

People who hang around long enough to do some more Haskell programming
will run into the other monads sooner or later.  But IO is an unavoidable
step to
writing Haskell programs.



On Dec 4, 2007 5:11 AM, Dan Piponi <dpiponi at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 3, 2007 6:36 PM, Ben Franksen <ben.franksen at online.de> wrote:
> > then the special features of IO
> > will remain associated with monads in general, leading to a whole jumble
> of
> > completely wrong ideas about them.
>
> As I only learnt about monads a couple of years ago, the process is
> still fresh in my mind. I wasted quite a bit of time labouring under
> the impression that monads were primarily about sequencing. But that
> wasn't because I incorrectly generalised from IO. It was because
> countless people out there explicitly said they were about sequencing.
> I suspect that if courses started with the List monad there'd be
> countless blogs telling people that monads are a way to eliminate
> loops from your code like the way list comprehensions are used in
> Python.
>
> > This is yet another problem with IO as the standard example for monads:
> its
> > effect base is huge and poorly structured.
>
> You don't teach *all* of IO to students in one go!
>
> > This again makes it difficult to
> > see exactly which intuitions about IO can be generalized to arbitrary
> > monads and which not.
>
> That's true of any monad. IO is unique. [] is unique. Cont is unique.
> All of them can lead you down the garden path. You need to see
> multiple monads, and it helps if you can sneak an example under a
> student's nose so they can already reason about monads before they
> even know what a monad is.
>
> > What is pointless about failure and how to handle it?
>
> It's pointless when you're still trying to make your first tweaks to
> "Hello, World!" work.
> --
> Dan
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