[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Ross Mellgren]

For what it's worth, many (most/all?) programmers I know in person  
don't have the slightest clue about Category Theory and they may have  
known about abstract algebra once upon a time but certainly don't  
remember any of it now. They usually understand the concepts perfectly  
well enough but by "lay terms" or by no particular name at all.

Personally, I don't mind it too much if the generic typeclasses are  
named using extremely accurate terms like Monoid, but saying that  
someone should then look up the abstract math concept and try to map  
this to something very concrete and simple such as a string seems like  
wasted effort.

Usually when encountering something like "Monoid" (if I didn't already  
know it), I'd look it up in the library docs. The problem I've had  
with this tactic is twofold:

First, the docs for the typeclass usually don't give any practical  
examples, so sometimes it's hard to be sure that the "append" in  
"mappend" means what you think it means.

Second is that there appears to be no way to document an _instance_.  
It would be really handy if there were even a single line under  
"Instances > Monoid ([] a)" that explained how the type class was  
implemented for the list type. As it is, if you know what a Monoid is  
already, it's easy to figure out how it would be implemented. If you  
don't, you're either stuck reading a bunch of pages on the generic  
math term monoid and then finally realizing that it means  
"appendable" (and other similar things), or grovelling through the  
library source code seeing how the instance is implemented.

My 2 cents,

-Ross


On Jan 15, 2009, at 11:36 AM, Lennart Augustsson wrote:

> 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.
>>
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