[Haskell-cafe] Proposed "Restructuring" of State Monad page in Haskell Wikibooks

Tue Sep 29 15:03:01 UTC 2020

No problem! My original comment was meant to be somewhat tongue in cheek (as maybe was Branimir’s response?). My website (IMHO) is way beyond trivial, and was probably up and running after a mere 6 months! (I’d never built a website before, or used e.g. GitHub, Docker, Ubuntu, AWS, etc, so they were all a bit of a challenge too).

Anyway, enough of this. If anyone does have comments on the page, it would probably be best to add them on the discussion page alongside the article (now here<https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Davjam2:Example/StateMonad>).

Unless there are any strong objections, I’ll overwrite the main page with the reworked one in a week or so, and I’ll be doing some final reviewing and tweaking of the page in the meantime. (And thanks to Bryan and Hilco for their comments).

Thanks!
David.

From: Tom Smeding<mailto:tom.smeding at gmail.com>
Sent: 29 September 2020 14:46
To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org<mailto:haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Proposed "Restructuring" of State Monad page in Haskell Wikibooks

Hi all,

Branimir wrote:
> Two years is not enough to do anything serious in Haskell. That is beyond demo programs.

This statement carries a lot of assumptions, some of which may be true in this case, some of which may not -- I don't know David James -- but I think it isn't good to let this statement stand on its own like that.
If a student who has never programmed before starts learning Haskell, they will not be able to succeed professionally after just two years unless they have other useful background knowledge and/or talent (let's not discuss whether talent is a thing or not). However, the email by David James did not sound like he is a beginner in the act of programming; indeed, with experience in imperative (C++, VB), declarative (SQL), functional (Lisp) and logic (Prolog) programming languages, that certainly does not count as "has never programmed before". And I think we can agree that someone with sufficient experience in programming at large can learn to use Haskell effectively in two years (which is quite a long time, even if it's irregular practice). At least, I strongly believe this until proven otherwise. If that is indeed not the case, then something is seriously wrong on Haskell's side, as Gregory has noted below.

David: I haven't read your rewritten State monad tutorial, for which my apologies; also apologies for kind of derailing this thread.

Cheers, and have a great day,
Tom Smeding

P.S. This message wasn't accepted by the mailing list earlier, so was just sent to some people personally. Sorry for duplicate emails.

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 15:14, Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at miu.edu<mailto:guthrie at miu.edu>> wrote:
If this is true, Haskell will probably never move up into even the top 40 of used languages, which would be too bad! And it would be interesting to see why – certainly people find good productivity in the mainstream IP languages in even 6-9 months.
  (Look at salaries from bootcamp placements.)

Currently Haskell is significantly below Cobol, Fortran, Lisp, and Pascal in the language usage/ratings.   :-(

Dr. Gregory Guthrie
Maharishi International University
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From: Haskell-Cafe <haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org<mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org>> On Behalf Of Branimir Maksimovic
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2020 7:17 AM
To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org<mailto:haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Proposed "Restructuring" of State Monad page in Haskell Wikibooks

Two years is not enough to do anything seroius in Haskell. That is beyond demo programs.

Greets, Branimir.

On 9/28/20 6:37 PM, David James wrote:
Hello – I’m proposing to restructure this<https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Understanding_monads/State>, and I have a draft here<https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Davjam2:Example/StateMonad>. I’ve given my main reasons for the restructuring at the top of the draft page.

I’d very much like feedback before updating the real page, especially if people don’t like the new one much.

I’m new here, so should probably say a bit about myself. I’ve been learning-by-doing Haskell for about two years. Sometimes I feel I’m starting to get it, but these feelings don’t usually last long. I’m certainly not an expert, and don’t have a PhD in Very Clever Things. I do have quite an extensive IT background, originally programming in Lisp and Prolog, then (sadly) C++, VB and SQL but have had quite a long break from programming (doing dumb things like architecting systems and project managing) before looking at Haskell. I built this website<https://decimos.net/> and this library<https://hackage.haskell.org/package/MapWith>, just for my own amusement.

Apologies if this isn’t the right place to send this. (But then where is?) I’ve already put a note on the page itself about the new draft, but I’ve no idea whether anyone will notice it.

Thanks very much,
David.

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