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

[Paul Moore]

On 10/12/2007, 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?

Sigh. I've seen this type of comment on this list so many times, and I
still feel insulted by it. Must the Haskell community (and yes, I know
it's not everyone, it's quite probably only a few members, but it
feels like a lot) treat anyone who just wants to get a job done, while
being open minded enough to consider a new and very unconventional
language, as being "impatient" and a "quick and dirty hacker"?

I'm sorry. I left it quite a while before I responded, so that my
initial annoyed feeling could subside, but it didn't. I've hit all of
Dan's barriers (apart from fear of recursion :-)) and yet I would not
characterise myself as you describe (OK, maybe somewhat impatient
:-)). Also, I have a fair bit of experience with non-imperative styles
- I have, over the years, learnt a number of languages including Lisp,
Prolog, Scheme and many others with functional or non-imperative
aspects (I even recall looking a little at Hope and Miranda a long
while ago).

Haskell is the most practical functional language I have encountered,
but I still feel that IO (in the most general sense of interaction
with the outside world) is hard in Haskell[1]. Maybe it *can* be easy,
but it isn't yet. And ignoring that fact isn't helping anyone.

Paul.

[1] Certainly you can toss out examples of easy IO in Haskell. Things
like interact help a lot. But ultimately, you hit something hard -
maybe it's handling errors robustly while using IO, or interacting
with a database rather than a screen, or whatever. But at some point,
you run out of clean off-the-shelf encapsulations, and get to
genuinely hard stuff - and that happens in a huge step change, rather
than a gradual increase of complexity that you can take as slowly as
you need to.