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

[David Menendez]

On Dec 10, 2007 1:44 PM, Dan Piponi <dpiponi at gmail.com> 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".


I thought your blog post about the IO monad for people who don't care about
monads (yet) was a pretty good start.

As it happens, the IO monad was one of the things that attracted me to
Haskell. When I was learning SML in college, I wondered how one could do I/O
in a functional style. SML provides I/O via functions with side-effects,
which struck me as crude and contrary to the functional style.

Years later, I encountered Haskell and learned that it handled I/O tasks
using something called the "IO monad". I had no idea what a monad was, but I
understood the implications: Haskell could be referentially transparent
*and* do I/O. This was what inspired me to learn the language.

As I learned more Haskell, I discovered the other monads and the Monad class
and the full generality of the "do" notation. Eventually, a light came on
and monads suddenly made sense.

I don't know if it's best to learn the IO monad before or after other
monads. I suspect no choice is right for everyone. An experienced programmer
who is new to Haskell is going to have different questions than a beginning
programmer with no preconceived notions.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>
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