[Haskell-cafe] Haskell's "historical futurism" needs better writing, not better tools

[Viktor Dukhovni]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 08:27:15PM +1300, Anthony Clayden wrote:
> > Switching subtopics to the "Chirality" section, ...
> 
> I take Ben's point (with which I agree) to be that "Chirality" is an even
> more obscure word than "Endomorphism". (Except perhaps in the realm of
> subatomic particle physics.)

The word occurred only in the section title, which will now (MR 6555) read:

    Expectation of efficient left-to-right iteration

> Grokking this material is hard enough without having to reach for a
> dictionary. If you mean 'left-biased' vs 'right-biased', or
> 'from-front' vs 'from-rear' or 'Cons-oriented' vs 'Snoc-oriented', say
> that. (And I'll be interested to see how anyone explains this without
> `fromList` jigging their elbow.)

Yes, of course.

> Now I can see Foldable structures are abstract, not spatial. But Cons is
> recursive on its (textually) right operand, whereas `Bin` or `Node` are
> symmetric between their (textually) left/right recursive operands. I
> guessed that's what the Chirality section was talking about, so I skimmed
> the first sentence and skipped on.

Skipping material a reader feels they already know is fine, it is there
for those who might need it, or just as a signal that, yes, I know that
you know ... that some structures like to be more difficult than others.

-- 
    Viktor.