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However, the c community never felt like going on and on and on about bitwise manipulation... Anyone have any idea why people get so hung up about explaining mo

However, the c community never felt like going on and on and on about bitwise manipulation... Anyone have any idea why people get so hung up about explaining monads?

blub 7y ago
I've seen that some programming communities focus on writing software, while others focus on talking about software. C and Haskell are two good examples of this dynamic, although C is used in so many different projects that "community" only loosely applies.
- isoprophlex 7y ago
  Interesting, maybe the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is much more relevant for programming languages than for natural languages; maybe the language shapes the things a human can comfortably express, and this shapes the communities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
jerf 7y ago
I think there's a good chunk of it that's just nerd-sniping. Some it was just a sort of stand-alone complex, too; people started writing monad tutorials because people writing monad tutorials was the thing to do. In the Go community, there was a run for a couple of years of people making stupidly overoptimized HTTP routers, even though there's very few websites where that's actually the problem and even fewer where the answer was to create a fancy router. Why? Because other people were making stupidly overoptimized routers. It was a smaller instance of the same thing and ultimately damaged the community less than I think the overfocus on monad tutorials did for Haskell, but it was not the best thing for Go. Monad tutorials did have a particular problem, though, which is that rather a lot of them were wrong, too. I made my own list of issues here: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2928 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2928 That particular post is in the context of people trying to implement "monads" out of Haskell, but the misconceptions I list tended to come from the lower quality Haskell tutorials in the first place. Then, as is the way of things, the wrongness spread around the world before the correction had its boots on, as the saying goes.
rcfox 7y ago
When I was learning C 20 years ago, it felt like the C tutorials were really hung up on how scary pointers were, in a very similar way to Haskell's fixation on monads. It got to the point that I questioned my understanding pointers because I didn't get why everyone spent so much effort on explaining them.
pandaman 7y ago
You can write useful C programs without ever using bitwise manipulation. It's quite hard in Haskell without monads since the standard I/O library is a monad. You are limited only to evaluating values with REPL unless you use a monad. And, because the I/O is a monad, you cannot just say "use this function to read input and this other function to print output" so you need to explain the whole monad situation early into the language study.
de_watcher 7y ago
For C it was about the pointers.

However, the c community never felt like going on and on and on about bitwise manipulation... Anyone have any idea why people get so hung up about explaining monads?

blub 7y ago

I've seen that some programming communities focus on writing software, while others focus on talking about software. C and Haskell are two good examples of this dynamic, although C is used in so many different projects that "community" only loosely applies.

isoprophlex 7y ago
Interesting, maybe the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is much more relevant for programming languages than for natural languages; maybe the language shapes the things a human can comfortably express, and this shapes the communities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

jerf 7y ago

I think there's a good chunk of it that's just nerd-sniping. Some it was just a sort of stand-alone complex, too; people started writing monad tutorials because people writing monad tutorials was the thing to do. In the Go community, there was a run for a couple of years of people making stupidly overoptimized HTTP routers, even though there's very few websites where that's actually the problem and even fewer where the answer was to create a fancy router. Why? Because other people were making stupidly overoptimized routers. It was a smaller instance of the same thing and ultimately damaged the community less than I think the overfocus on monad tutorials did for Haskell, but it was not the best thing for Go. Monad tutorials did have a particular problem, though, which is that rather a lot of them were wrong, too. I made my own list of issues here: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2928 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2928 That particular post is in the context of people trying to implement "monads" out of Haskell, but the misconceptions I list tended to come from the lower quality Haskell tutorials in the first place. Then, as is the way of things, the wrongness spread around the world before the correction had its boots on, as the saying goes.

rcfox 7y ago

When I was learning C 20 years ago, it felt like the C tutorials were really hung up on how scary pointers were, in a very similar way to Haskell's fixation on monads. It got to the point that I questioned my understanding pointers because I didn't get why everyone spent so much effort on explaining them.

pandaman 7y ago

You can write useful C programs without ever using bitwise manipulation. It's quite hard in Haskell without monads since the standard I/O library is a monad. You are limited only to evaluating values with REPL unless you use a monad. And, because the I/O is a monad, you cannot just say "use this function to read input and this other function to print output" so you need to explain the whole monad situation early into the language study.

de_watcher 7y ago

For C it was about the pointers.