[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Dan Piponi]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> But you
> really *should not* need to do an undergraduate course in mathematical
> theory just to work out how to concat two lists. That's absurd. Some kind of
> balance needs to be found.

Balance is good, but it's hard to find a balance when people exaggerate so much.

Firstly: You don't need monoids to concat two lists. You need monoids
when you want to abstract the operation of concatting two lists so
that the same code can be reused in other ways. A good example is the
writer monad. The author of that monad could have made it work just
with strings. But one of the coollest things about Haskell is the way
it's so amenable to micro-refactoring. By realising there's a bunch of
other things the Writer monad can do using *exactly the same
implementation* you get reusability. If you don't want this kind of
reusability you may be better off with C or Fortran.

Secondly: you don't need an "undergraduate course." to understand
monoids. A monoid is just a collection of things with an operation
allowing you to combine two things to get another one. And an element
that acts like 'nothing' so that when you combine it with other
elements it leaves them unchanged (and an additional simple
condition). This would be the first 30 seconds of a course on monoids
that presupposes nothing more than a naive idea of what a set is. The
only thing that's difficult about monoids is that it's a new word.
There's little 'theory' involved.

Your talk of undergraduate courses to concat two lists isn't grounded
in any kind of reality, muddies the waters, and probably scares people
away from Haskell by giving the impression that it's much harder than
it is.
--
Dan