[Haskell-cafe] Tutorial: Haskell for the Evil Genius

[Joel Burget]

Kris,

Sorry for the confusion, I wasn't directly addressing your post. I was trying to correct what I perceived as a misconception in the last paragraph of Andrew's message, beginning with "Given that…".

- Joel


On Saturday, September 15, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Kristopher Micinski wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 10:08 PM, Joel Burget <joelburget at gmail.com (mailto:joelburget at gmail.com)> wrote:
> > [snip]
> >  
> > Also, Maybe and Either are not "implemented as monads". They are defined
> > using `data` like you suggest:
> >  
> > data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a
> > data Either a b = Left a | Right b
> >  
>  
>  
> That's not my point, or my objection. My objection is to people who
> present monads showing examples that begin with Maybe or Either, or
> these 'trivial monads,' types onto which you can strip monadic
> behavior fairly simply. I'm not saying they're bad as monads, or
> useless, but I think the step from Maybe as a datatype to using it as
> a monad is great enough that explaining monads by way of introducing
> them with Maybe as an example is sort of confusing because it
> trivializes what's actually going on.
>  
> I'm honestly not sure what you mean by Maybe or Either being
> "implemented as monads," versus others. Monad is just a type class,
> there's always an underlying type. Perhaps you mean that people
> actually *care* about things in Maybe outside of it being used as a
> monad, versus other things where you don't touch the underlying type.
>  
> This isn't intended to start an argument, however, and I'd prefer not
> to argue over methodology, I just wanted to throw out there that if
> you say "monads, think about maybe, and add some stuff, then that's it
> is, what's all the fuss about!?" I think the hard part for people
> understanding monads isn't the definition of monads, but rather that
> you are forced to really tackle higher order behavior in a very direct
> way. (For example, say you're new to Haskell, you probably don't know
> about CPS, and you read about Cont in a monad tutorial. Is it the
> monad that makes it hard? No, it's probably the concept of CPS.)
>  
> kris  

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