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

[Andrew Wagner]

I was thinking the same thing. If I remember correctly, RWH does a parser in
an applicative style, but I'll have to look when I get home to be sure. If
so, then maybe we could try doing the same thing in a monadic style, for
comparison and contrast purposes.

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Jeff Heard <jefferson.r.heard at gmail.com>wrote:

> Come to think of it, I've never seen an applicative tutorial of
> Parsec, only a monadic one.  Does such a beast exist, and if so, maybe
> we could merge the two together, work the same example in both, and
> thus help the programmer make the shift from monadic to applicative,
> from order of parsing to describing the grammar.
>
> -- Jeff
>
> 2009/3/12 Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net>:
> > Thank you Bob!  I'll throw in another 2 cents:
> >
> > Yes, *one* aspect of Haskell is that it's a power tool for imperative
> > programming -- a clever way to keep plugging away at the old sequential
> von
> > Neumann paradigm.  C++++.
> >
> > I'd rather we strongly encourage Haskell-newbies toward shifting out of
> the
> > imperative paradigm to thinking and programming *functionally*.  It's a
> big
> > shift, to make, and imperative-Haskell is a relatively easy substitute.
> >
> >    - Conal
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 7:28 AM, Thomas Davie <tom.davie at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> 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_______________________________________________
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> >
> >
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