[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Dan Weston]

Richard Feinman once said: "if someone says he understands quantum 
mechanics, he doesn't understand quantum mechanics".

But what did he know...

Luke Palmer wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Michael Giagnocavo <mgg at giagnocavo.net 
> <mailto:mgg at giagnocavo.net>> wrote:
> 
>      >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.
> 
>     I've been studying Haskell a bit to understand and learn more about
>     functional programming (I'm using F#). I have to say, the scariest
>     thing I've faced was exactly what you say. Everything I read built
>     "monads" up to be this ungraspable thing like quantum mechanics.
> 
> 
> Yeah, monad is on the same level as quantum mechanics.  Both are equally 
> simple and popularly construed as ungraspable.
> 
> (However to grasp monads easily you need a background in FP; to grasp QM 
> easily you need a background in linear algebra)
> 
> Luke
>