[Haskell-cafe] Alternative name for return

[damodar kulkarni]

>
> I bet you can find an abundance of C programmers who think that
> "strcmp" is an intuitive name for string comparison (rather than
> compression, say).


But at least, 'strcmp' is not a common English language term, to have
acquired some unintentional 'intuition' by being familiar with it even in
our daily life. The Haskell terms, say, 'return' and 'lift', on the other
hand, do have usage in common English, so even a person with _no_
programming background would have acquired some unintentional 'intuition'
by being familiar with them.

And in that light, _for_me_, 'lift' is more _intuitive_ than 'return' or
'pure'. It seems, to me, like the thing being 'lifted' from a given world
into a more 'abstract' world.

Of course, I recall reading somewhere: a poet is a person who uses the
different words to mean the same thing, while a mathematician is a person
who ascribes more meanings to the same word.

Haskell, being originated from _mathy_ people, we do get to _enjoy_ this
effect.
Having said this, it has actually helped me build a different type of
'intuition' for words and I do enjoy it.



Thanks and regards,
-Damodar Kulkarni


On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 6:40 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz>wrote:

>
> On 6/08/2013, at 9:28 PM, J. Stutterheim wrote:
>
> > That argument makes sense, although I find it a bit counter-intuitive
> still.
>
> In discussions like this, I have never been able to discover any meaning
> for
> "intuitive" other than "familiar".  Applying "pure" to an IO operation
> doesn't
> go against *my* intuition because Haskell has *trained* my intuition to
> see 'putStrLn "Hi"' as a pure value; it's not the thing itself that has
> effects,
> but its interpretation by an outer engine, just as my magnetic card key
> has by
> itself no power to open doors, but the magnetic reader that looks at the
> card
> _does_.  I don't attribute agency to the card!  I'm not arguing that my
> intuition is _right_, only that it is _different_.
>
> In particular, for anyone who has much experience with Haskell, "return" is
> almost the only name that could possibly be intuitive because that _is_ the
> name that is familiar.  Haskell programmers who've got used to Applicative
> will also find "pure" intuitive, *because it is familiar*.
>
> I bet you can find an abundance of C programmers who think that
> "strcmp" is an intuitive name for string comparison (rather than
> compression, say).
>
>
>
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