On 10/12/2007, Henning Thielemann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Dan Piponi wrote: > > > When someone comes to me and says "I have this Python script that > > scans through these directories and finds the files that meet these > > criteria and generates a report based on this template, could I do it > > better in Haskell?" it'd be good to have a better answer than "to do > > this you could use the IO monad, but to do things properly you need to > > understand monads so here, learn about the List monad and the Maybe > > monad first, understand how this interface abstracts from both, come > > back when you've finished that, and then I'll tell you how to read and > > write files". And I definitely want a better answer than "Haskell I/O > > is performed using the IO monad but everyone thinks this is bad so > > just wait a few years and someone may write a fancy new nice > > combinator library that does exactly what you want". There are > > thousands of competing programming languages out there, and there are > > dozens that are viable choices for the task I just mentioned. If my > > response to their question takes longer than the time it would take to > > find another language and implement a solution, then Haskell will > > remain a niche language. > > I raise my question once again: Must Haskell's tutorials be tailored to > impatient programmers? Does Haskell need quick&dirty hackers?
Sigh. I've seen this type of comment on this list so many times, and I still feel insulted by it. Must the Haskell community (and yes, I know it's not everyone, it's quite probably only a few members, but it feels like a lot) treat anyone who just wants to get a job done, while being open minded enough to consider a new and very unconventional language, as being "impatient" and a "quick and dirty hacker"? I'm sorry. I left it quite a while before I responded, so that my initial annoyed feeling could subside, but it didn't. I've hit all of Dan's barriers (apart from fear of recursion :-)) and yet I would not characterise myself as you describe (OK, maybe somewhat impatient :-)). Also, I have a fair bit of experience with non-imperative styles - I have, over the years, learnt a number of languages including Lisp, Prolog, Scheme and many others with functional or non-imperative aspects (I even recall looking a little at Hope and Miranda a long while ago). Haskell is the most practical functional language I have encountered, but I still feel that IO (in the most general sense of interaction with the outside world) is hard in Haskell[1]. Maybe it *can* be easy, but it isn't yet. And ignoring that fact isn't helping anyone. Paul. [1] Certainly you can toss out examples of easy IO in Haskell. Things like interact help a lot. But ultimately, you hit something hard - maybe it's handling errors robustly while using IO, or interacting with a database rather than a screen, or whatever. But at some point, you run out of clean off-the-shelf encapsulations, and get to genuinely hard stuff - and that happens in a huge step change, rather than a gradual increase of complexity that you can take as slowly as you need to. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
