[Haskell-cafe] Haskell & monads for newbies

[Andrew Coppin]

Steve Schafer wrote:
>> "basically everything I write programs for is mainly about I/O..."
>>     
>
> It's funny how people always seem to think that, but if you look at what
> they're really doing, I/O is usually the least of their worries.
> Programming GUIs is about the only reasonably common I/O-related task
> that has any sort of complexity. Most everything else is reading or
> writing streams of bytes; the hard part is what happens between the
> reading and the writing.
>   

Indeed, I replied "if all you want to do is run some algorithm over some 
data, you can write a thin layer to do the I/O, and then write the rest 
in pure code". And everybody was like "er, I don't understand what 
distinction you think you're making..."

Obviously, what I meant is that one can write

  main = do
    stuff <- readFile "source.txt"
    writeFile "source.exe" $ compile stuff

  compile = ...

I guess because in most normal programming languages you can do I/O 
anywhere you damn like, it doesn't occur to most programmers that it's 
possible to make a seperation. (Most seem to realise that, e.g., mixing 
business logic with GUI code is a Bad Thing though...)


I saw a quote somewhere round here that went like this:

  "Haskell isn't really suited to heavily I/O-oriented programs."
  "What, you mean like darcs?"
  "...oh yeah."

;-)