[Haskell-cafe] Haskell & monads for newbies

[Andrew Coppin]

Derek Elkins wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-07-14 at 21:25 -0400, Steve Schafer wrote:
>   
>> On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:21:50 +0100, you wrote:
>>
>> [quoting a generic attitude]
>>
>>     
>>> "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.
>>     
>
> Or for a different slant look at xmonad. (www.xmonad.org)
>   

I'm still really really fuzzy on why this exists...

Anyway, I have pointed out that somebody once wrote a Quake clone in 
Haskell - and that's about as interactive, I/O-intensive and performance 
demanding as it gets. It's basically doing all the stuff that Haskell 
supposedly sucks at. And yet it works. (I'm told...) However, this 
argument convinces nobody. Saying "it can be done" is different from 
saying "it can be done easily". ("One person did it" seems to imply the 
former, whereas "loads of people have done it" would imply the latter...)