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

[Lennart Augustsson]

If Haskell wants yo significantly widen it's audience then the tutorials
have to cater for the impatient.
Perhaps it's better to remain a fringe language.  I truly don't know.

  -- Lennart


On Dec 10, 2007 7:00 PM, Henning Thielemann <lemming at henning-thielemann.de>
wrote:

>
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Dan Piponi wrote:
>
> > When someone comes to me and says "I have this Python script that
> > scans through these directories and finds the files that meet these
> > criteria and generates a report based on this template, could I do it
> > better in Haskell?" it'd be good to have a better answer than "to do
> > this you could use the IO monad, but to do things properly you need to
> > understand monads so here, learn about the List monad and the Maybe
> > monad first, understand how this interface abstracts from both, come
> > back when you've finished that, and then I'll tell you how to read and
> > write files". And I definitely want a better answer than "Haskell I/O
> > is performed using the IO monad but everyone thinks this is bad so
> > just wait a few years and someone may write a fancy new nice
> > combinator library that does exactly what you want". There are
> > thousands of competing programming languages out there, and there are
> > dozens that are viable choices for the task I just mentioned. If my
> > response to their question takes longer than the time it would take to
> > find another language and implement a solution, then Haskell will
> > remain a niche language.
>
> I raise my question once again: Must Haskell's tutorials be tailored to
> impatient programmers? Does Haskell need quick&dirty hackers?
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