[Haskell-cafe] What is your favourite Haskell "aha" moment?

[Brett Gilio]

Alexey, could you expand on what you mean in your first point? I am 
quite intrigued. I do not use Haskell often, but that could be something 
of interest to me in-and-out of Haskell.

Brett Gilio
brettg at posteo.net | bmg at member.fsf.org
Free Software -- Free Society!

On 07/12/2018 07:46 AM, Alexey Raga wrote:
> Not sure if it counts as "aha moments", but when I started with Haskell 
> I had two major reasons (not in any importance order):
> 
> 1. The ability to define the specification (types) and then "just" 
> follow them in implementation. Sometimes even without having a clear 
> understanding of the things I was using, I felt (and still feel) guided 
> towards the right solution.
> 
> 2. The ability to refactor fearlessly is a _massive_ productivity boost. 
> Hard to underestimate.
> 
> Regards,
> Alexey.
> 
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 10:10 PM Simon Peyton Jones via Haskell-Cafe 
> <haskell-cafe at haskell.org <mailto:haskell-cafe at haskell.org>> wrote:
> 
>     Friends____
> 
>     In a few weeks I’m giving a talk to a bunch of genomics folk at the
>     Sanger Institute <https://www.sanger.ac.uk/> about Haskell.   They
>     do lots of programming, but they aren’t computer scientists.____
> 
>     I can tell them plenty about Haskell, but I’m ill-equipped to answer
>     the main question in their minds: /why should I even care about
>     Haskell/?  I’m too much of a biased witness.
> 
>     ____
> 
>     So I thought I’d ask you for help.  War stories perhaps – how using
>     Haskell worked (or didn’t) for you.  But rather than talk
>     generalities, I’d love to illustrate with copious examples of
>     beautiful code. ____
> 
>       * Can you identify a few lines of Haskell that best characterise
>         what you think makes Haskell distinctively worth caring about?  
>         Something that gave you an “aha” moment, or that feeling of joy
>         when you truly make sense of something for the first time.____
> 
>     The challenge is, of course, that this audience will know no
>     Haskell, so muttering about Cartesian Closed Categories isn’t going
>     to do it for them.  I need examples that I can present in 5 minutes,
>     without needing a long setup.____
> 
>     To take a very basic example, consider Quicksort using list
>     comprehensions, compared with its equivalent in C.  It’s so short,
>     so obviously right, whereas doing the right thing with in-place
>     update in C notoriously prone to fencepost errors etc.  But it also
>     makes much less good use of memory, and is likely to run slower.  I
>     think I can do that in 5 minutes.____
> 
>     Another thing that I think comes over easily is the ability to
>     abstract: generalising sum and product to fold by abstracting out a
>     functional argument; generalising at the type level by polymorphism,
>     including polymorphism over higher-kinded type constructors.   Maybe
>     8 minutes.____
> 
>     But you will have more and better ideas, and (crucially) ideas that
>     are more credibly grounded in the day to day reality of writing
>     programs that get work done.____
> 
>     Pointers to your favourite blog posts would be another avenue.  (I
>     love the Haskell Weekly News.)____
> 
>     Finally, I know that some of you use Haskell specifically for
>     genomics work, and maybe some of your insights would be particularly
>     relevant for the Sanger audience.____
> 
>     Thank you!  Perhaps your responses on this thread (if any) may be
>     helpful to more than just me.____
> 
>     Simon____
> 
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