At the risk of painting my own bikeshed...
If you're learning Haskell, which communicates the idea more clearly:
* Appendable
or
* Monoid
Would you call function composition (on endofunctions) "appending"?
The join of a monad? A semi-colon (as in sequencing two imperative
statements)? How do you append two numbers? Addition, multiplication,
or something else entirely?
All these operations are monoidal, i.e., are associative and have both
left and right identities. If that's exactly what they have in common,
why invent a new name? "Appendable" may carry some intuition, but it
is not precise and sometimes quite misleading.
I guess the bottom line question is: who is Haskell for? Category
theorists, programmers, or both? I'd love it to be for both, but I've
got to admit that Brian has a point that it is trending to the first
in
some areas.
One of my grievances about Haskell is the occasional disregard for
existing terminology. "Stream Fusion" is about lazy lists/co-lists,
not streams; "type families" mean something entirely different to type
theorists. This kind of misnomer is even more confusing than a name
that doesn't mean anything (at least, until you learn more category
theory).
Wouter
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