[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[John Goerzen]

Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> I have replied on his blog, but I'll repeat the gist of it here.
> Why is there a fear of using existing terminology that is exact?
> Why do people want to invent new words when there are already existing
> ones with the exact meaning that you want?
> If I see Monoid I know what it is, if I didn't know I could just look
> on Wikipedia.
> If I see Appendable I can guess what it might be, but exactly what does it mean?

Picture someone that doesn't yet know Haskell.

If I see Appendable I can guess what it might be.  If I see "monoid", I
have no clue whatsoever, because I've never heard of a monoid before.

Using existing terminology isn't helpful if the people using the
language have never heard of it.

Wikipedia's first sentence about monoids is:

  In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic
  structure with a single, associative binary operation and an identity
  element.

Which is *not* intuitive to someone that comes from a background in....
 any other programming language.

A lot of communities have the "not invented here" disease -- they don't
like to touch things that other people have developed.  We seem to have
the "not named here" disease -- we don't want to give things a sensible
name for a programming language that is actually useful.

Here's another, less egregious, example: isInfixOf.  I would have called
that function "contains" or something.  Plenty of other languages have
functions that do the same thing, and I can't think of one that names it
anything like "isInfixOf".

If you're learning Haskell, which communicates the idea more clearly:

 * Appendable

or

 * Monoid

I can immediately figure out what the first one means.  With the second,
I could refer to the GHC documentation, which does not describe what a
Monoid does.  Or read a wikipedia article about a branch of mathematics
and try to figure out how it applies to Haskell.

The GHC docs for something called Appendable could very easily state
that it's a monoid.  (And the docs for Monoid ought to spell out what it
is in simple terms, not by linking to a 14-year-old paper.)

I guess the bottom line question is: who is Haskell for?  Category
theorists, programmers, or both?  I'd love it to be for both, but I've
got to admit that Brian has a point that it is trending to the first in
some areas.

-- John