DDC compiler and effects; better than Haskell? (was Re: [Haskell-cafe] unsafeDestructiveAssign?)

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Well, the point is that you still have monadic and pure programming
styles. It's true that applicative style programming can help here,
but then you have these <$> and <*> operators everywhere, which also
feels like boilerplate code (as you mention, some extensions could
help here)

Monadic style even has the do syntax, which really looks imperative,
while of course, it isn't.

I know that for e.g. doing a DFS I can use the ST monad and still be
pure, however, my code *looks* imperative when I use the do syntax,
which mentally feels weird (maybe it's just me being mentally ill ;-)

It's even worse with the arrows syntax: without it I wouldn't be able
to write complex Yampa stuff, but the syntax makes me feels that I'm
drawing boxes and links using ASCII, and suddenly it *feels* different
than when doing "nice" pure / applicative style programming. Again,
maybe it's just my brain that is fucked up by 25 years of imperative
programming :)

So to me, keeping the syntax in a pure style (a bit like ML and F#)
plays nicer with my brain.

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Pavel Perikov<perikov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> unless you have some insanely
>> clever refactoring tool ready that can convert pure into monadic
>> functions and vice versa.
>
> Not trying to attack the idea, just some thoughts:
>
> I don't see much problem converting pure function into an "effectfull" form
> :) Having pure function
> myPureFunction::a1->a2->a3->res
> ....
> myPureFunction a1 a2 a3 -- pure call
> myPureFunction <$> a1 <*> a2 <*> a3 -- call using Applicative
>
> Probably, introducing some conventions and using some language extensions
> you can write a function taking pure function and converting it into monadic
> version (a-la SPJ' work on polyvariadic composition etc [1])
>
> Have monadic function but needs to call it from pure code? use
> Control.Monad.Identity.
>
> Not a big deal to me but maybe I'm missing the point
>
> -----
> [1] http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/types.html#polyvar-comp
>
>
>
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