I think the documentation should be reasonably newbie-friendly too. But that doesn't mean we should call Monoid Appendable. Appendable is just misleading, since Monoid is more general than appending.
-- Lennart On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 4:51 PM, John Goerzen <jgoer...@complete.org> wrote: > Lennart Augustsson wrote: >> Why do people think that you should be able to understand everything >> without ever looking things up? > > I don't. But looking things up has to be helpful. In all to many > cases, looking things up means clicking the link to someone's old > academic paper or some article about abstract math in Wikipedia. It > does not answer the questions: > > * Why is this in Haskell? > > * Why would I want to use it? > > * How does it benefit me? > > * How do I use it in Haskell? > > If the docs for things like Monoids were more newbie-friendly, I > wouldn't gripe about it as much. > > Though if all we're talking about is naming, I would still maintain that > newbie-friendly naming is a win. We can always say "HEY MATHEMETICIANS: > APPENDABLE MEANS MONOID" in the haddock docs ;-) > > Much as I dislike Java's penchant for 200-character names for things, > I'm not sure Monoid is more descriptive than > SomeSortOfGenericThingThatYouCanAppendStuffToClassTemplateAbstractInterfaceThingy > :-) > > -- John > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe