[Haskell-cafe] On the verge of ... giving up!

[Vimal]

@Andrew:
> This probably works quite well for mainstream programming languages
> (since they're all so similar), but is unlikely to work at all for
> Haskell (since, as far as I know, no other programming language on Earth
> is remotely like it - Miranda excluded). Even Lisp and Erland are
> nothing like Haskell, and they're supposedly based on the same ideas.

I didnt know this when I _started_ :) So, thats why I am learning Haskell
in exclusion.
>
> Not a bad way to learn to use a tool. You might want to stick to things
> that involve simple I/O and complex processing rather than the other way
> round though. ;-) (For example, I wrote a program that renders an
> animation of the solutions of a simple differential equation by
> numerical integration. The math is complex; the I/O just involves
> dumping millions of numbers into a big text file.)
>

Yes, as someone pointed out, Haskell was meant for a lot of computation,
and IO is just a part of the story!

> For the longest time I couldn't remember whether it's "monad" or
> "monand"... but anyway, yeah, it's a common problem. It's not actually
> complicated ones you understand it; it's just that it's so abstract that
> it's hard to explain. It's a bit like trying to explain to somebody what
> a "magnet" is... it's not a complex concept, just hard to describe.
>

But, being a computer science student, I think I need to look into it too!
I like the quote found on this site: http://patryshev.com/monad/m-intro.html
<quote>
Monads in programming seem to be the most mysterious notion of the century.
I find two reasons for this:

    * lack of familiarity with category theory;
    * many authors carefully bypass any mention of categories.

It's like talking about electricity without using calculus.
Good enough to replace a fuse, not good enough to design an amplifier.
</quote>

> >
>
> I'm a maths nerd. To me, Haskell looks like an advanced term-rewrite
> system similar to Mathematica. It was quite easy to learn the basics.
> What took longer was learning to approach problems in the right way. The
> way you'd do things in an object oriented language is usually NOT the
> way you'd do it in Haskell. (Unless you enjoy making your life hard...)
> Unfortunately, that's all practice.
>

Ah, I am not familiar with the "term-rewrite" you are talking about.
I will Google it up then.
Thanks :)
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