On Friday 26 January 2007 22:14, Tim Newsham wrote:
> > impractical language, only useful for research. Erik Meijer at one point
> > states that programming in Haskell is too hard and compares it to
> > assembly programming!
>
> He brings up a very good point. Using a monad lets you deal with
> side effects but also forces the programmer to specify an exact
> ordering. This *is* a bit like making me write assembly language
>
> programming. I have to write:
> > do {
> > x <- getSomeNum
> > y <- anotherWayToGetANum
> > return (x + y)
> > }
>
> even if the computation of x and y are completely independant of
> each other. Yes, I can use liftM2 to hide the extra work (or
> fmap) but I had to artificially impose an order on the computation.
> I, the programmer, had to pick an order.
Humm. While I can accept that this is a valid criticism of Haskell's monadic
structure for dealing with I/O, I fail to see how it could drive a decision
to prefer an imperative language like C#, where every statement has this
property (overspecification of evaluation order). The only mainstream-ish
general-purpose language I know of that I know of that attempts to addresses
this problem head-on is Fortress. (Although, to be honest, I don't know
enough about Fortress to know how it handles I/O to even know if it is an
actual improvement over the situation in Haskell.)
> Ok, maybe "assembly language" is a bit extreme (I get naming, allocation
> and garbage collection!) but it is primitive and overspecifies the
> problem.
>
> Tim Newsham
> http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
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