[Haskell-cafe] Re: How does one get off haskell?

[Liam O'Connor]

One way to avoid explicit, per-type unmarshalling is to use the
existentialquantification extension to make a box type that you can
store in a map, thus producing a heterogenous map of any types (with
constraints).

Cheers.
~Liam



On 19 June 2010 04:08, aditya siram <aditya.siram at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've written code with less bugs in Haskell than any other language
> I've used. And that's a credit to GHC and not because I'm a great
> programmer.
>
> But I still don't know how to deal with the situation where you don't
> have a clear picture of your data  or heterogenous data that you are
> wrapping up in a type just to make the compiler happy?
>
> Here's an example of the latter: I was writing some Haskell web app
> code where continuations are used to compose multi-step web
> transactions. The continuations were stored in a map keyed with a
> unique session id and invoked when the user POST'ed back that session
> id. The problem was that the map would only accept functions of one
> intermediate type and one result type. So I had to marshall/unmarshall
> all my functions to some common type (ContT () IO String  in my case)
> just so I could store it in the map - which felt kind of dirty.
>
> While pointers on this particular problem would be appreciated, I
> think this is the kind of issue (needing to be flexible about data
> types) is a stumbling block for many beginning Haskell programmers.
>
> -deech
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Andy Stewart
> <lazycat.manatee at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Edward Z. Yang" <ezyang at MIT.EDU> writes:
>>
>>> Excerpts from Bryan O'Sullivan's message of Fri Jun 18 13:16:58 -0400 2010:
>>>> I'm inclined to disagree. It's precisely when the code is in a state of
>>>> constant upheaval that I want the type system to be pointing out my dumb
>>>> errors.
>>>
>>> In my experience, the type system has forced me to care about thing that I
>>> don't want to care about (yet).  It's a different mindset: in the words of the
>>> prototyper: being first is valued over being correct.
>>>
>>> This does mean that Haskell forces you to write long-term maintainable
>>> code from the get-go, yes. :-)
>> Haha, that's true. :)
>>
>> When i write Haskell code, it force me write *framework* code.
>>
>> Sometimes, i wrote dirty code quickly,
>> Haskell will told me :
>>
>>   "Hey, bad code! Rewrite it! I don't accept dirty code ... bla bla ...".
>>
>> Then i rewrite my code to make it flexible and maintainable.
>>
>> Once you build beautiful framework code, you will find your life is so
>> simple. :)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>  -- Andy
>>
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