[Haskell-cafe] Abuse of the monad [was: monadic logo]

[Thomas Davie]

On 12 Mar 2009, at 15:16, Andrew Wagner wrote:

> Can you expand on this a bit? I'm curious why you think this.

For two reasons:

Firstly, I often find that people use the Monadic interface when one  
of the less powerful ones is both powerful enough and more convenient,  
parsec is a wonderful example of this.  When the applicative instance  
is used instead of the monadic one, programs rapidly become more  
readable, because they stop describing the order in which things  
should be parsed, and start describing the grammar of the language  
being parsed instead.

Secondly, It seems relatively common now for beginners to be told  
about the IO monad, and start writing imperative code in it, and  
thinking that this is what Haskell programming is.  I have no problem  
with people writing imperative code in Haskell, it's an excellent  
imperative language.  However, beginners seeing this, and picking it  
up is usually counter productive – they never learn how to write  
things in a functional way, and miss out on most of the benefits of  
doing so.

Hope that clarifies what I meant :)

Bob