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I miss the pre-Rust days. When Haskell was HN's cool pet language, and you had to obtain at least some vague familiarity with the term "monad" to understand ha

I miss the pre-Rust days. When Haskell was HN's cool pet language, and you had to obtain at least some vague familiarity with the term "monad" to understand half the discussion threads here. I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand the purpose that "Optional" was intended to serve. And are unduly dismissive simply because it does not serve some larger purpose that was not intended.

theLiminator 4y ago
I mean having a monadic api is nice if it's strictly enforced by both ecosystem/culture/typesystem. But with Optional being potentially a null itself, it barely improves the need to defensively program and might in fact be worse. For example, when I used a lot of Scala in a past job, Java libraries were scary to use unless you defensively wrap java functions with Try/Option/etc. Whereas with Haskell/Rust/OCaml/etc. you can largely trust type signatures to properly encode the existence of nullability or failure.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand the purpose that "Optional" was intended to serve. Lol, your response is the equivalent of the old SNL "IT guy" skits: "Silly programmer peasant, you don't even know what a monad is!" Regardless of what you may think Optional was intended to serve, I have seen its use across large and varied code bases, and it simply does not make the cognitive burden easier for developers. Again, look at the example given by the GP comment. Of course Optional isn't intended to be used that way. But the fact is, as the compiler doesn't prohibit it, it WILL get used that way, and it doesn't provide strong guarantees about the state of the variable.
chlorion 4y ago
Yeah the concept of an Optional type is just too complex for other less advanced beings than yourself to understand. Having the Optional class be nullable is actually genius and makes perfect sense, they are just not bright enough to see it!

theLiminator 4y ago

I mean having a monadic api is nice if it's strictly enforced by both ecosystem/culture/typesystem. But with Optional being potentially a null itself, it barely improves the need to defensively program and might in fact be worse. For example, when I used a lot of Scala in a past job, Java libraries were scary to use unless you defensively wrap java functions with Try/Option/etc. Whereas with Haskell/Rust/OCaml/etc. you can largely trust type signatures to properly encode the existence of nullability or failure.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

> I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand the purpose that "Optional" was intended to serve. Lol, your response is the equivalent of the old SNL "IT guy" skits: "Silly programmer peasant, you don't even know what a monad is!" Regardless of what you may think Optional was intended to serve, I have seen its use across large and varied code bases, and it simply does not make the cognitive burden easier for developers. Again, look at the example given by the GP comment. Of course Optional isn't intended to be used that way. But the fact is, as the compiler doesn't prohibit it, it WILL get used that way, and it doesn't provide strong guarantees about the state of the variable.

chlorion 4y ago

Yeah the concept of an Optional type is just too complex for other less advanced beings than yourself to understand. Having the Optional class be nullable is actually genius and makes perfect sense, they are just not bright enough to see it!