[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Lennart Augustsson]

Most people don't understand pure functional programming either.  Does
that mean we should introduce unrestricted side effects in Haskell?

  -- Lennart

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:22 PM, Thomas DuBuisson
<thomas.dubuisson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Sittampalam, Ganesh
> <ganesh.sittampalam at credit-suisse.com> wrote:
>> 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?
>>
>> I would suggest that having to look things up slows people down
>> and might distract them from learning other, perhaps more useful,
>> things about the language.
>
> Exactly.  For example, the entry for monoid on Wikipedia starts:
> "In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an
> algebraic structure with a single, associative binary operation and an
> identity element."
>
> I've had some set theory, but most programmers I know have not.
>