[Haskell-cafe] about Haskell code written to be "too smart"

[Jonathan Cast]

On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 23:15 +0100, Manlio Perillo wrote:
> Dan Piponi ha scritto:
> >> Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
> >>> takeList = evalState . mapM (State . splitAt)
> > 
> >> However, ironically, I stopped using them for pretty
> >> much the same reason that Manlio is saying.
> > 
> > Are you saying there's a problem with this implementation? It's the
> > only one I could just read immediately. 
> 
> Yes, you understand it immediately once you know what a state monad is.
> But how well is introduced, explained and emphasized the state monad in 
> current textbooks?
> 
> When I started learning Haskell, the first thing I learned was recursion 
> and pattern matching.

You know, this might actually need to be looked into.

You need to know recursion and pattern-matching to *write* re-usable
higher-order functions, but how appropriate is that as the first thing
taught?

jcc