[Haskell-cafe] Comments from OCaml Hacker Brian Hurt

[Conal Elliott]

Thanks, Bob!  I'm with on both counts: Monad is misrepresented as central in
code composition; and (Monad m) => (a -> m b) -> (m a -> m b) is a much
nicer type (for monadic extension), only in part because it encourages
retraining away from sequential thinking.  I encountered this nicer
formulation only recently, and am glad to finally understand why I've been
so uncomfortable with the type of (>>=).

  - Conal

2009/1/15 Thomas Davie <tom.davie at gmail.com>

>
> 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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