[Haskell-cafe] Robert Harper on monads and laziness

[Tony Morris]

On 02/05/11 17:54, Ketil Malde wrote:
> I'm following Harper's blog, Existential Type¹, which I find to be an
> enjoyable and entertainingly written tirade about the advantages of
> teaching functional programming - specifically ML - to students.  Of
> course, he tends to be critical of Haskell, but it's nice to get some
> thought provoking opinion from somebody who knows a bit about the
> business.
>
> Recently, he had a piece on monads, and how to do them in ML, and one
> statement puzzled me:
>
>   "There is a particular reason why monads had to arise in Haskell,
>    though, which is to defeat the scourge of laziness."
>
> My own view is/was that monads were so successful in Haskell since it
> allowed writing flexible programs with imperative features, without
> sacrificing referential transparency.  Although people are quick (and
> rightly so) to point out that this flexibility goes way beyond IO, I
> think IO was in many ways the killer application for monads.  Before IO,
> we had very limited functionality (like 'interact' taking a 'String ->
> String' function and converting it into an exectuable program) to build
> real programs from.
>
> Laziness does require referential transparency (or at least, it is
> easier to get away with the lack of RT in a strict language), so I can
> see that he is indirectly correct, but RT is a goal in itself.  Thus, I
> wonder if there are any other rationale for a statement like that?
>
> -k
>
> ¹ http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/
Interesting how I have been authoring and subsequently using monads in
scala for several years and it is strictness that gets in the way more
than anything.

http://github.com/scalaz/scalaz/

I have been teaching functional programming for quite a while, both in
universities and outside of academia, and I am of the opinion that
Haskell's suitability in first place has no close second place. I wonder
why I am wrong, but this post (and previous) is hardly persuasive.

-- 
Tony Morris
http://tmorris.net/