[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Thomas Davie]

On 15 Jan 2009, at 16:34, John Goerzen wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Don Stewart noticed this blog post on Haskell by Brian Hurt, an OCaml
> hacker:
>
> http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2009/01/15/random-thoughts-on- 
> haskell/
>
> It's a great post, and I encourage people to read it.  I'd like to
> highlight one particular paragraph:

[snip]
Sorry, I'm not going to refer to that paragraph, instead, I'm going to  
point out how depressing it is, that the message we're getting across  
to new haskellers is that "Monads, and variations on monads and  
extensions to monads and operations on monads are the primary way  
Haskell combines code-".  We have loads of beautiful ways of combining  
code (not least ofc, simple application), why is it than Monad is  
getting singled out as the one that we must use for everything?

My personal suspicion on this one is that Monad is the one that makes  
concessions to imperative programmers, by on of its main combinators  
(>>=) having the type (>>=) :: (Monad m) => m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b,  
and not the much nicer type (>>=) :: (Monad m) => (a -> m b) -> (m a - 
 > m b).

Bob
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