[Haskell-cafe] side effects (Why Haskell is beautiful to thenovice)

[Donn Cave]

quoth <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz>
...
> I see someone has changed it back to the old muddled wreck, sigh.

I sympathize with what I understand to be the point, that it's silly
to call an effect that's clearly central to a computation a "side effect."

That said, it sure is widely used that way, and an attempt to correct
this is not only swimming upstream, it also encounters ambiguities that
the common definition avoids.

Maybe it would be more productive to see this an opportunity to talk
about how FP and Haskell in particular organize effectful computations
to avoid the problems with side effects.

I think the FP paragraph on this page could be much better - "The
functional language Haskell expresses side effects such as I/O and
other stateful computations using monadic actions."  That's it?
Can this be written so it would address what Haskell brings to
the problem, in a way that would make sense to a Java programmer?

	Donn