[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Derek Elkins]

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:59 +0000, Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
> > How does forcing them to learn proposed terminology such as `Appendable'
> > help here?  Learners of Haskell do still need to learn what the new word
> > means.
> 
> The contention is that 'Appendable' is an intuitive naming that people
> will already have a rudimentary grasp of.  This as opposed to Monoid,
> which absolutely requires looking up for the average coder.

In programming, -every- name requires looking up or some other way of
checking meaning.  Other than perhaps arithmetic operators (and I have
had that bite me), I have -never- in any language written code using a
name without having some assurance that it actually meant what I thought
it meant.  Usually you have to "look something up" to even know a name
exists no matter how "intuitive" it turns out to be.