[Haskell-cafe] Haskell & monads for newbies (was "Functional dependencies *not* part of the next Haskell standard?")

[Derek Elkins]

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 16:01 +0200, peterv wrote:
> Thanks for the advice. I did not really deeply investigate the monad type
> classes yet...
> 
> It looks like its gonna take a long time for me to learn Haskell. I'm not
> sure if my long history of imperative and object-oriented programming has
> something to do with it. Reading Haskell books like SOE is one thing, but
> writing software in Haskell is really difficult for me. Not only do I miss
> the "spoiled OO programmer" IDEs with all their candy and code completion
> and assistants, but I also get the feeling that although similar programs in
> Haskell or typically N times shorter than their imp/OO counterparts, it
> would take *me* at least N^2 longer to write them ;) (now I must admit I had
> the same feeling when switching from 680x0 assembler to C++, but let's say
> N*2 longer instread of N^2...) Is this true for Haskell in general? I mean
> how long do experienced Haskell developers spent writing code "to get it
> right" (excluding minor bugs and performance issues)? Or do they write down
> Haskell fluently?

Skilled Haskell programmers write Haskell fluently, but I'd say that
that still tends to require more thought per line on average than a
typical imperative language.  A single line of Haskell tends to do a
heck of a lot more than a single line of mainstream imperative
languages.  Usually, though, once you get a nice base encoding your
domain concepts, things move faster.  The more code you write the -less-
thinking you should need to do relative to imperative languages.
Haskell code complexity grows (much) slower with size as compared to
most imperative languages.