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

Wolfgang Jeltsch g9ks157k at acme.softbase.org
Tue Dec 11 10:56:54 EST 2007


Am Dienstag, 11. Dezember 2007 14:46 schrieb Hans van Thiel:
> On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 20:00 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> [snip]
>
> > I raise my question once again: Must Haskell's tutorials be tailored to
> > impatient programmers? Does Haskell need quick&dirty hackers?
>
> IMO yes, because it exposes the language to the outside world and that's
> a form of testing. In the end, anything that's not usable is useless.
> Paraphrasing a quote about science in general, "There is nothing about
> Haskell that cannot be grasped by a second rate mind through
> persistence." Let's not exaggerate how difficult and special it all is.
> And the purpose of a tutorial is not to make the writer look smart and
> important, but to ease things for the reader. I wouldn't want to exclude
> the scurrilous unwashed from the Haskell experience, this close to
> Christmas, too. :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Hans van Thiel

Maybe there are also patient people in the outside world so that we can still 
expose Haskell to the outside world while not trying to attract 
quick-and-dirty hackers. ;-) 

Haskell is not a quick-and-dirty language but quite the opposite.  Haskell’s 
unique selling propositions are features like type classes, higher order 
functions and lazy evaluation which make life easier in the long term.  The 
downside of these features is that they might make life harder in the short 
term.

That said, I definitely think that we should make learning the language as 
easy as possible.  But our ultimate goal should be to primarily show 
newcomers the Haskell way of problem solving, not how to emulate Python or 
Java programming in Haskell.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang


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