Hello,
On Thursday 15 January 2009 19:59, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
It is rather funny. When we are young kids, we learn weird symbols like
A B C a b c 1 2 3
which we accept after a while.
Then we get to learn more complex symbols like
! ? + - /
and that takes some time to get
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Why do people think that you should be able to understand everything
without ever looking things up?
I'll get back to my example from the comment on the blog post. If I
see 'ghee' in a cook book I'll check what it is (if I don't know). It
has a precise meaning and
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:56 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Most people don't understand pure functional programming either. Does
that mean we should introduce unrestricted side effects in Haskell?
The key is to introduce concepts to them in terms they can understand.
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:17 +, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Andrew Coppin
andrewcop...@btinternet.com mailto:andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote:
The sad thing is, it's not actually complicated. The documentation
just makes
How does forcing them to learn proposed terminology such as `Appendable'
help here? Learners of Haskell do still need to learn what the new word
means.
The contention is that 'Appendable' is an intuitive naming that people
will already have a rudimentary grasp of. This as opposed to Monoid,
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:29 +, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Jonathan Cast wrote:
Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an
engineering discipline whose adherents were permitted to remain ignorant
of the basic mathematical terminology and methodology that their
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:59 +, Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
How does forcing them to learn proposed terminology such as `Appendable'
help here? Learners of Haskell do still need to learn what the new word
means.
The contention is that 'Appendable' is an intuitive naming that people
will
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 16:03 -0500, Andrew Wagner wrote:
I think perhaps the correct question here is not how many instances
of Monoid are there?, but how many functions are written that can
use an arbitrary Monoid. E.g., the fact that there are a lot of
instances of Monad doesn't make it
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Andrew Coppin
andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote:
But you
really *should not* need to do an undergraduate course in mathematical
theory just to work out how to concat two lists. That's absurd. Some kind of
balance needs to be found.
Balance is good, but it's
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:21:57 -0800, you wrote:
Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an
engineering discipline whose adherents were permitted to remain ignorant
of the basic mathematical terminology and methodology that their
enterprise is founded on?
Umm, all of
Maybe you can explain that again?
I see how the subset of Kleisli arrows (a - m a) forms a monoid (a,
return . id, =), but what to do with (a - m b)? (=) is not closed
under this larger set.
Dan
Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
Notice that monoid sounds almost *exactly* like monad. And yet,
what
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 01:50:11PM -0800, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:56 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Most people don't understand pure functional programming either. Does
that mean we should introduce unrestricted side effects in Haskell?
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:59 +, Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
How does forcing them to learn proposed terminology such as `Appendable'
help here? Learners of Haskell do still need to learn what the new word
means.
The contention is that 'Appendable' is an intuitive naming that people
will
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 17:13 +, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Most people don't understand pure functional programming either.
Does that mean we should introduce unrestricted side effects in
Haskell?
No, just that we should seek to minimise the new stuff they
On 16 Jan 2009, at 01:10, Dan Weston wrote:
Maybe you can explain that again?
Sure.
Consider the following setting: a category C and a bifunctor T : C x C
- C, which is associative and have a (left and right) unit I. This is
what is called monoidal category.
A monoid is an object X in
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:21 +, Andrew Coppin wrote:
OK, well then my next question would be in what say is defining
configuration files as a monoid superior to, uh, not defining them as a
monoid? What does it allow you to do that you couldn't otherwise? I'm
not seeing any obvious
Duncan Coutts wrote:
By making a type an instance of Monoid instead of exporting
emptyFoo, joinFoo functions it makes the API clearer because it shows
that we are re-using an existing familiar concept rather than inventing
a new one. It also means the user already knows that joinFoo must be
I'm not sure having a Monoid class is actually useful for anything - but if
we must have it, there seems to be little better possible name for something
so vague.
IMO the Monoid class is useful since, if you define mempty and mappend, you
get mconcat for free. I don't see what the problem
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Miguel Mitrofanov
miguelim...@yandex.ru wrote:
If, however, you category is a category of endofunctors of some category D
(that is, functors D - D), and T is composition, then our monoids become
monads on D: I is an identity functor, first morphism is return,
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Duncan Coutts
duncan.cou...@worc.ox.ac.uk wrote:
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:21 +, Andrew Coppin wrote:
OK, well then my next question would be in what say is defining
configuration files as a monoid superior to, uh, not defining them as a
monoid? What does
On 15/01/2009, at 23:27, Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:21 +, Andrew Coppin wrote:
OK, well then my next question would be in what say is defining
configuration files as a monoid superior to, uh, not defining them
as a
monoid? What does it allow you to do that you
off the top of their head what the difference between an epimorphism and a
hylomorphism is?
They're not even from the same branch of mathematics.
Epimorphisms are defined in category theory, as arrows which can be
cancelled when they appear on the right of a composite, that is, if f
is an
2009/1/15 Sittampalam, Ganesh ganesh.sittampa...@credit-suisse.com:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
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.
Actually programming requires -far more- precision than mathematics ever
has. The standards of formal and precise that mathematicians use
are a joke to computer scientists and programmers. Communication is
also more important or at least more center stage in mathematics than
programming.
If you're learning Haskell, which communicates the idea more clearly:
* Appendable
or
* Monoid
I can immediately figure out what the first one means. With the second,
I could refer to the GHC documentation, which does not describe what a
Monoid does. Or read a wikipedia article
While you're absolutely correct and I agree with you, to be fair,
essentially all mathematicians have a sense of rigourisability
(whether they recognise it or not), which is a peculiar standard that
they apply to everything they hear or read. The level of rigour at
which mathematicians communicate
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Coppin
andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote:
As an aside, the integers form two different monoids. Haskell can't [easily]
handle that. Does anybody know of a language that can?
Some of the ML-derived languages can do that. Essentially, your code
takes
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 16:16 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 01:50:11PM -0800, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:56 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
Most people don't understand pure functional programming either. Does
that mean we
John Goerzen ha scritto:
Hi folks,
Don Stewart noticed this blog post on Haskell by Brian Hurt, an OCaml
hacker:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2009/01/15/random-thoughts-on-haskell/
It's a great post, and I encourage people to read it. I'd like to
highlight one particular paragraph:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Cale Gibbard cgibb...@gmail.com wrote:
However, Appendable carries baggage with it which is highly
misleading. Consider, for instance, the monoid of rational numbers
under multiplication (which, by the way, is quite useful with the
writer transformed list monad
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 15:25 -0800, Max Rabkin wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Cale Gibbard cgibb...@gmail.com wrote:
However, Appendable carries baggage with it which is highly
misleading. Consider, for instance, the monoid of rational numbers
under multiplication (which, by the
On Thursday 15 January 2009 6:21:28 pm David Menendez wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Coppin
andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote:
As an aside, the integers form two different monoids. Haskell can't
[easily] handle that. Does anybody know of a language that can?
Some of the
2009/1/15 Andrew Coppin andrewcop...@btinternet.com:
OK, well then my next question would be in what say is defining
configuration files as a monoid superior to, uh, not defining them as a
monoid? What does it allow you to do that you couldn't otherwise? I'm not
seeing any obvious advantage,
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 14:11 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 07:46:02PM +, Andrew Coppin wrote:
John Goerzen wrote:
If we *must* insist on using the most obscure possible name for
everything, can we at least write some documentation that doesn't
require a PhD
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:59 +, Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
How does forcing them to learn proposed terminology such as `Appendable'
help here? Learners of Haskell do still need to learn what the new word
means.
The contention is that 'Appendable' is an intuitive naming that people
will
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 18:21 -0500, Cale Gibbard wrote:
While you're absolutely correct and I agree with you, to be fair,
essentially all mathematicians have a sense of rigourisability
(whether they recognise it or not), which is a peculiar standard that
they apply to everything they hear or
Derek Elkins wrote:
No one doubts that there is room for improvement. However, the
direction is better documentation, not different names. Better names is
fine, but I have not heard any remotely convincing alternative for any
of the above terms.
After thinking about it, I think you are
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 9:15 AM, John Goerzen jgoer...@complete.org wrote:
If you're learning Haskell, which communicates the idea more clearly:
* Appendable
or
* Monoid
But Appendable is wrong.
merge :: Ord a = [a] - [a] - [a]
merge [] ys = ys
merge xs [] = xs
merge (x:xs) (y:ys) | x
Your talk of undergraduate courses to concat two lists isn't grounded
in any kind of reality, muddies the waters, and probably scares people
away from Haskell by giving the impression that it's much harder than
it is.
I've been studying Haskell a bit to understand and learn more about functional
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Michael Giagnocavo m...@giagnocavo.netwrote:
Your talk of undergraduate courses to concat two lists isn't grounded
in any kind of reality, muddies the waters, and probably scares people
away from Haskell by giving the impression that it's much harder than
it
Richard Feinman once said: if someone says he understands quantum
mechanics, he doesn't understand quantum mechanics.
But what did he know...
Luke Palmer wrote:
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Michael Giagnocavo m...@giagnocavo.net
mailto:m...@giagnocavo.net wrote:
Your talk of
Andrew Wagner wrote:
I think perhaps the correct question here is not how many instances of
Monoid are there?, but how many functions are written that can use an
arbitrary Monoid. E.g., the fact that there are a lot of instances of Monad
doesn't make it useful. There are a lot of instances of
+1 to that
Regards,
John
On Jan 15, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Cale Gibbard wrote:
2009/1/15 Sittampalam, Ganesh ganesh.sittampa...@credit-suisse.com:
Lennart Augustsson wrote:
I think the documentation should be reasonably newbie-friendly too.
But that doesn't mean we should call Monoid
Perhaps as a math/CS major I'm a bit biased here, but as a haskell
neophyte, I think my opinion is at least somewhat relevant...
The immediate problem is certainly documentation. No one would groan
more than once after hearing a term from abstract math if there was
sufficient Haskell-oriented
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 17:06 -0500, Steve Schafer wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:21:57 -0800, you wrote:
Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an
engineering discipline whose adherents were permitted to remain ignorant
of the basic mathematical terminology and
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Jonathan Cast
jonathancc...@fastmail.fm wrote:
On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 17:06 -0500, Steve Schafer wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:21:57 -0800, you wrote:
Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an
engineering discipline whose adherents
On 15 Jan 2009, at 16:34, John Goerzen wrote:
Hi folks,
Don Stewart noticed this blog post on Haskell by Brian Hurt, an OCaml
hacker:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2009/01/15/random-thoughts-on-
haskell/
It's a great post, and I encourage people to read it. I'd like to
highlight one
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