[Haskell-cafe] Martin Odersky on "What's wrong with Monads"

[Patrick Hurst]

I'd also say that reading command-line flags inside a simple function like
amount is a pretty large code smell. The only case in which it isn't would
be when the codebase is so small that redesigning the Haskell to be in IO
(or switch between amountPlus and amountTimes) is negligible anyway.

On Jun 26, 2012, at 18:59, Ozgun Ataman <ozataman at gmail.com> wrote:

We could debate this endlessly (as is common), but I would argue that a
"clean" design would make the option and alternative of multiplying
explicit in its design instead of including calls to fetch command line
arguments in an ad-hoc fashion everywhere.

The Haskell way of encoding this would be to define an app configuration
data type (say AppConfig), parse the command line arguments into it upfront
in IO and then run your application either in a in a monad that's an
instance of (MonadReader MyConfig) or explicitly pass the option in where
needed by a function. If you've designed your application this way, adding
a new command line option would cause very little -if any- refactoring. If
not, in my experience it is usually a 30 minute intense refactoring
campaign.

I suspect there might be a way to use implicit arguments here as well, but
that's something I've never felt compelled to use.

This kind of separation of concerns and "pure" application design is one of
the things that (I think) many people really like about Haskell.

Cheers,
Oz

On Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Tillmann Rendel wrote:

Hi,

MightyByte wrote:

Of course every line of your program that uses a Foo will change if you
switch
to IO Foo instead.


But we often have to also change lines that don't use Foo at all. For
example, here is the type of binary trees of integers:

data Tree = Leaf Integer | Branch (Tree Integer) (Tree Integer)

A function to add up all integers in a tree:

amount:: Tree -> Integer
amount (Leaf x) = x
amount (Branch t1 t2) = amountt1 + amountt2

All fine so far. Now, consider the following additional requirement: "If
the command-line flag --multiply is set, the function amount computes
the product instead of the sum."

In a language with implicit side effects, it is easy to implement this.
We just change the third line of the amount function to check whether to
call (+) or (*). In particular, we would not touch the other two lines.

How would you implement this requirement in Haskell without changing the
line "amount (Leaf x) = x"?

(I actually see three ways of doing this in Haskell, but all have
serious drawbacks and do not fully solve the problem).

Here it seems not so bad just to change all three lines of the amount
function, even if they are not strictly related to the semantic change
we want to make. But in a real program, this situation can translate to
changing thousands of lines of code in many functions just to implement
a minor change to a single requirement.

Tillmann

_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe


 _______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20120626/f6462a9b/attachment.htm>