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It takes a while to master reading math notation or music notation. Mastering reading Haskell isn't that different. Some people are served well enough by just l

It takes a while to master reading math notation or music notation. Mastering reading Haskell isn't that different. Some people are served well enough by just learning guitar tabs, others feel they're better off mastering music notation.

skimpycompiler 11y ago
This is not true, unlike C++, Haskell's syntax is enormously clean and easy to parse. It's in no way comparable to learning math notation or music notation.
- bsummer4 11y ago
  Yeah, this is a good point. Both math and music have extremely ad-hoc and inconsistent syntax.
- pdpi 11y ago
  > easy to parse There's a few things, like fixity declarations, that make parsing Haskell not quite as easy as it could be.
- cousin_it 11y ago
  IMO there are many nice things about Haskell, but simplicity is not one of them. It's very consciously a "big" language, rather than a "small" one. As others have mentioned, you can declare your own operators with custom precedence. And don't forget the whitespace rules either. Lennart Augustsson, implementor of at least one Haskell compiler, has said this at some point: Implementing exactly Haskell's rule for indentation is incredibly hard. In fact, no known Haskell compiler gets it right. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/060657.html https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/0...
iheartmemcache 11y ago
APL/J/K is way more "operator soup-y" than Haskell, but there are pages like this http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/action/show/Vocabulary/AET?action=show&redirect=Vocabulary%2FAbsolutelyEssentialTerms#VerbRank http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/action/show/Vocabulary/AET?ac... that for the newbie followed by http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc. Someone needs to make Typeclassopedia for operator soup. For the record, I can read both standard notation music and guitar tabs. I'm fairly competent at Haskell have written APL/J/K derivative languages for a living. "Mastering reading Haskell" certainly has to do with a lack of "go to this page on the wiki/hoogle/haddock and you can read the meaning and idiomatic usage of the 95% most common operators", not a lack of conceptual grasp of anything difficult.
- jberryman 11y ago
  But that has nothing to do with syntax beyond "infix operators are a thing".

skimpycompiler 11y ago

This is not true, unlike C++, Haskell's syntax is enormously clean and easy to parse. It's in no way comparable to learning math notation or music notation.

bsummer4 11y ago
Yeah, this is a good point. Both math and music have extremely ad-hoc and inconsistent syntax.
pdpi 11y ago
> easy to parse There's a few things, like fixity declarations, that make parsing Haskell not quite as easy as it could be.
cousin_it 11y ago
IMO there are many nice things about Haskell, but simplicity is not one of them. It's very consciously a "big" language, rather than a "small" one. As others have mentioned, you can declare your own operators with custom precedence. And don't forget the whitespace rules either. Lennart Augustsson, implementor of at least one Haskell compiler, has said this at some point: Implementing exactly Haskell's rule for indentation is incredibly hard. In fact, no known Haskell compiler gets it right. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/060657.html https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-April/0...

iheartmemcache 11y ago

APL/J/K is way more "operator soup-y" than Haskell, but there are pages like this http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/action/show/Vocabulary/AET?action=show&redirect=Vocabulary%2FAbsolutelyEssentialTerms#VerbRank http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/action/show/Vocabulary/AET?ac... that for the newbie followed by http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/NuVoc. Someone needs to make Typeclassopedia for operator soup. For the record, I can read both standard notation music and guitar tabs. I'm fairly competent at Haskell have written APL/J/K derivative languages for a living. "Mastering reading Haskell" certainly has to do with a lack of "go to this page on the wiki/hoogle/haddock and you can read the meaning and idiomatic usage of the 95% most common operators", not a lack of conceptual grasp of anything difficult.

jberryman 11y ago
But that has nothing to do with syntax beyond "infix operators are a thing".