[Haskell-cafe] Language extensions

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On May 28, 2007, at 5:39 , Andrew Coppin wrote:

> I like to think I'm an intelligent, but... maybe I'm just kidding  
> myself...

Haskell's good at making people feel stupid.  :)

Just a little background, btw:  I'm no mathie, in fact I have some  
problems with math for various reasons.  Nor am I a CS researcher.   
I'm a career system administrator who got into computing as a  
teenager back when schools didn't offer computing courses and  
*certainly* didn't offer CS theory courses.  So I'm pretty close to  
the opposite of Haskell's "target audience" --- yet I find it useful  
and see productivity gains from using it (modulo the learning curve).

One of the nice things about Haskell is that you don't need to  
understand category theory to use monads, or advanced type theory to  
use GADTs or rank-N polymorphism.  You *do* need to learn what  
they're good for --- but this is really no different than any other  
language.  It's just that most other languages don't pack so many  
features into so small a space, because they don't have Haskell's  
expressiveness; this can be both blessing (you can do in libraries  
what other languages have to hardcode into the language) and curse  
(wrapping your head around e.g. GADTs or monads).

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH