Re: [Haskell-cafe] Think of a monad...
And we have reached the monadic equivalent of Schrodinger's cat. On 1/31/07, Eric Y. Kow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Dear Haskellers, In the recent HWN, I noticed a new monad metaphor by Don Stewart: Think of a monad as a spacesuite full of nuclear waste in the ocean next to a container of apples. now, you can't put oranges in the space suite or the nucelar waste falls in the ocean, *but* the apples are carried around anyway, and you just take what you need This metaphor very clearly captures the essence of monads. Perhaps it will be even more helpful if accompanied by a small illustration: http://koweycode.blogspot.com/2007/01/think-of-monad.html I hope this turns out to be useful to somebody, -- Eric Kow http://www.loria.fr/~kow PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9 Merci de corriger mon français. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- Frederick Ross Graduate Fellow, (|Siggia> + |McKinney>)/sqrt(2) Lab The Rockefeller University Je ne suis pas Fred Cross! ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] State of OOP in Haskell
I'm going to be offensive, bigoted, and myopic for a minute here: programming straight onto the Turing machine (and not too dissimilarly, the von Neumann machine) is the act of making your thoughts comprehensible to a little gizmo that exists to zip back and forth on an infinite ticker tape. We should therefore abstract. However, I am only marginally happier about making my thoughts comprehensible to a tinkertoy set (which is how I regard object oriented programming). Why not just stay as close to mathematics as possible? Why the deep desire to communicate your loftiest intentions to a tinkertoy set? There was the Lambada project to map between Java's object hierarchies and Haskell, however, and there was a lot of effort put into making Haskell talk properly through COM. Both of those necessitate a model of object oriented programming embedded in Haskell which would provide you with prior art. On 1/27/07, Alexy Khrabrov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ...In the tradition of the "letters of an ignorant newbie"... What's the consensus on the OOP in Haskell *now*? There're some libraries such as OOHaskell, O'Haskell, and Haskell~98's own qualified type system with inheritance. If I have GHC, which way to do anything OOP-like is considered "right" today? -- Frederick Ross Graduate Fellow, (|Siggia> + |McKinney>)/sqrt(2) Lab The Rockefeller University Je ne suis pas Fred Cross! ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] How did you stumble on Haskell?
On 1/28/07, Alexy Khrabrov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: How do people stumble on Haskell? Read Ullman's book on ML. Look at Haskell at that point, but was insufficiently mathematically sophisticated to "get it" (hey, I was sixteen). Wrote numerical analysis code in Forth for a year or so. Hacked on a several hundred thousand line FORTRAN 77 codebase. Wrote the simulation code for my physics thesis in C. Decided I never wanted to instantiate, destroy, or otherwise manage memory ever again. Had a hate-hate relationship with MATLAB, decided Mathematica was rubbish. Remembered Haskell. Now creating the programmatic equivalent of a cyborg, hunchback puppeteer to control a Java image analysis program in Scheme. So of course the best work I've done has been completely analytic mathematical physics without reference to computing of any kind. And I'm a biologist. This is known as being born in the Random monad. -- Frederick Ross Graduate Fellow, (|Siggia> + |McKinney>)/sqrt(2) Lab The Rockefeller University Je ne suis pas Fred Cross! ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Channel9 Interview: Software Composability and theFu ture of Languages
On 1/26/07, Collin Winter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I find it incredibly insulting for you to assert that people who complain about Haskell's difficulty are too lazy and aren't really interested in a better solution. Maybe they just don't want to have to take graduate-level classes in category theory to get their job done. Maybe they want a solution that meets them half-way, one that doesn't require that they understand how to build their own resistors and capacitors in order to make their TV work again (to use your analogy). That's what Meijer means when he says that Haskell is too hard. I have an odd background in programming (never took a compsci class, did take a graduate computational physics course in my first year of undergrad, taught by an old nuclear physicist, who used nothing but Forth...beat that for bizarre), but since physicists represent an interesting conglomeration of snapshots of the mainstream of programming through the ages, I do have a bit of an archaeological perspective on how people think about "hard." In case the following seems far fetched, let me assure you that four years ago I worked in a high energy physics group on a codebase of a few hundred thousand lines of FORTRAN 77, with no documentation. It had GOTOs. The folks working on this regarded C as a newfangled, difficult language, and some of them were still writing FORTRAN IV or RATFOR. So here's my completely anecdotal view of the history of "hard" in programming: In the beginning there was GOTO. Well, actually there was machine language, then assembler, but we'll skip that. GOTO was king. And then there was this movement among the ivory tower computer scientists called "structured programming." It was considered difficult and complicated, with lots of hard concepts. And then the compsci departments made a concerted effort, taught a generation of students in the new style with no reference whatsoever to what came before. Structured programming suddenly became blasé. How else would you program? And then similar, though smaller and often partial repetitions of this break happened: designing nicer data structures when the Wirth languages came to their height; object oriented programming (which I regard as one of the great intellectual failures of programming). So when the kids are presented with exercises on functors, ADTs, and monads in intro compsci, and the professors pretend that it was always this way, there was never any other way, then they will grow up, they will go forth, and these will be the everyday things. Until then, I will continue to hear people say that map is a scary, unfamiliar object that makes the meaning of code obscure. -- Frederick Ross Graduate Fellow, (|Siggia> + |McKinney>)/sqrt(2) Lab The Rockefeller University ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
