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Japanese resources really are the monad burritos of language learning.
by naniwaduni 4y ago
Japanese resources really are the monad burritos of language learning.
- solarmist 4y agoI think you're onto something, but I have no idea what a monad burrito is.
- superchroma 4y agoAt the very least a book in the vein of Snow Crash.
- naniwaduni 4y ago"Monad burritos" is a riff on Brent Yorgey's "monad tutorial fallacy" post[1], a piece of lore from the Haskell community which speaks to the phenomenon of tutorials/learning resources published by people who've just barely learned (or haven't quite yet understood) the lessons they purport to teach. They're particularly wont to highlight snappy "insights" that tie together a concept from the author's perspective, but that can be kind of useless or counterproductive to just hear about, since the work was done by grappling with concepts to arrive at an intuition, and the snappy bit doesn't actually impart any intuition on its own. And there is a vibrant ecosystem of Japanese learning resources like this. The landing page for this book sure smells like one! And this line from the OP: > In true hacker ethos, Japanese Complete was a project started to address a need the founders had and now it’s turning into a tangible product so it is quite exciting for us and we appreciate your continued support. absolutely sounds like a project started by someone who just learned a little Japanese ("a need the founders had"). It's a well-trod space. [1]: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/ https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...
- solarmist 4y agoOh! This is an excellent article! I just favorited this comment. Yes, language learning has an abundance of this. Everyone's learned a language so they all feel qualified to explain how it works or teach others. Is there a name for that fallacy? It seems like a special case of the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physicists-think-they-know-everything-and-why-theyre-wrong/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/09/why-my-fellow-physic...).
- Koshkin 4y agoI’d love to have a poster with a monad tutorial in Japanese.
- tantalor 4y agoJapanese resources are just ethnographies in the category of psycholinguistics, what's the problem?
- solarmist 4y agoThere isn't a problem. To me it's more that a highly disproportionate number of programmers are drawn to languages and the Japanese language in particular. So I'm interested in why that's the case with Japanese, but not with German or Chinese as examples off the top of my head. The best explanation I can think of is the popularity of Japanese culture leads to a high enough exposure to the language to catch the attention of highly technical people who love finding and uncovering patterns in things. But that doesn't feel complete.
- tantalor 4y agoSorry I think that joke went over your head. 1990 - A committee formed by Simon Peyton-Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, Ashton Kutcher, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals creates Haskell, a pure, non-strict, functional language. Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
- solarmist 4y agoHehehe. Yup. Completely missed the joke.