[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Lennart Augustsson]

I think the documentation should be reasonably newbie-friendly too.
But that doesn't mean we should call Monoid Appendable.
Appendable is just misleading, since Monoid is more general than appending.

  -- Lennart

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:51 PM, John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> wrote:
> Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>> Why do people think that you should be able to understand everything
>> without ever looking things up?
>
> I don't.  But looking things up has to be helpful.  In all to many
> cases, looking things up means clicking the link to someone's old
> academic paper or some article about abstract math in Wikipedia.  It
> does not answer the questions:
>
>  * Why is this in Haskell?
>
>  * Why would I want to use it?
>
>  * How does it benefit me?
>
>  * How do I use it in Haskell?
>
> If the docs for things like Monoids were more newbie-friendly, I
> wouldn't gripe about it as much.
>
> Though if all we're talking about is naming, I would still maintain that
> newbie-friendly naming is a win.  We can always say "HEY MATHEMETICIANS:
> APPENDABLE MEANS MONOID" in the haddock docs ;-)
>
> Much as I dislike Java's penchant for 200-character names for things,
> I'm not sure Monoid is more descriptive than
> SomeSortOfGenericThingThatYouCanAppendStuffToClassTemplateAbstractInterfaceThingy
> :-)
>
> -- John
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