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I should be clear: you don't have to sell me on Haskell or these other concepts. I would love to add all that stuff to my toolbelt. I'm suggesting that the zoo

I should be clear: you don't have to sell me on Haskell or these other concepts. I would love to add all that stuff to my toolbelt. I'm suggesting that the zoo of new terminology makes the effort barrier to doing so much higher than it needs to be. I'm sure some of it really is warranted, but my experience looking at formal math and logic is that they make things a lot harder than they need to be by introducing terms and symbols that stand-in for intuitive concepts and require unnecessary mapping back and forth between what you're reading on the page and the underlying concepts.

tinco 5y ago
Alright, but you were praising the article for conveying the meaning of the words, when those meanings are useless without some sort of interesting application. I believe people find monads difficult to grok not because the definition is hard to remember, but because the situation in which it is useful to distinguish the type class is abstract and frankly not super useful in most cases. Funny thing about zoos of new terminology, back when I was an undergrad I found the type classes to be a confusing subject. Then one day I realized that type and class are basically synonyms so you might as well call them type types or class classes, which totally cemented the idea for some reason. My brain had been getting stuck on this random terminology and this just unclogged it.
- brundolf 5y ago
  > those meanings are useless without some sort of interesting application They're useful when trying to grok other blog posts or discussions that talk about them (often in service to some further concept that you have no hope of understanding without knowing that first layer of terminology) > My brain had been getting stuck on this random terminology and this just unclogged it Exactly! What I'm requesting is that the FP community at large gets more comfortable with the idea of providing those "X is roughly just Y" comparisons for newcomers, so they don't get stuck on all the random terminology and can be "unclogged".

tinco 5y ago

Alright, but you were praising the article for conveying the meaning of the words, when those meanings are useless without some sort of interesting application. I believe people find monads difficult to grok not because the definition is hard to remember, but because the situation in which it is useful to distinguish the type class is abstract and frankly not super useful in most cases. Funny thing about zoos of new terminology, back when I was an undergrad I found the type classes to be a confusing subject. Then one day I realized that type and class are basically synonyms so you might as well call them type types or class classes, which totally cemented the idea for some reason. My brain had been getting stuck on this random terminology and this just unclogged it.

brundolf 5y ago
> those meanings are useless without some sort of interesting application They're useful when trying to grok other blog posts or discussions that talk about them (often in service to some further concept that you have no hope of understanding without knowing that first layer of terminology) > My brain had been getting stuck on this random terminology and this just unclogged it Exactly! What I'm requesting is that the FP community at large gets more comfortable with the idea of providing those "X is roughly just Y" comparisons for newcomers, so they don't get stuck on all the random terminology and can be "unclogged".