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I love Haskell, I've been programming on it for about 5 years ,never professionally of course, but Haskell is just hard for everyone. Look, what's a Monad? Is

by igorgue 14y ago

I love Haskell, I've been programming on it for about 5 years ,never professionally of course, but Haskell is just hard for everyone. Look, what's a Monad? Is it a "wrapper around function invocations"? (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnMonads http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OnMonads) Or "a parameterized type which is an instance of the Monad type class, which defines >>= along with a few other operators. In layman's terms, a monad is just a type for which the >>= operation is defined" (http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/29253 http://stackoverflow.com/a/194207/29253) this definition is so bad, starting by the fact that a class aint what you think it is if you come from Python or Ruby. Most people would just wait for "Learn Haskell The Hard Way" to finally understand some of its concepts that get overcomplicated by Haskellers because they want to be the only ones understanding it. I'm generalizing of course, but sometimes it feels that way, at least to me, since I don't have a CS or Math background.

jonathansizz 14y ago
Yes, Haskell is hard for everyone. Maybe I can speak on behalf of the stupid majority, but (having spent quite some time trying to learn Haskell) perhaps many of us who have at one time or another taken an interest have at some point ceased to find the effort worthwhile? The most annoying thing is that there seems to be an implicit assumption from a sizable part of the Haskell crowd that Haskell is demonstrably the programming pinnacle toward which all serious coders should be aiming; those of us who fall short of this goal must therefore feel chastened and embarrassed at our obvious inferiority. Well, at some point when I was grinding through Real World Haskell, trying to build software that actually did something useful, I just reached the point where I simply couldn't be bothered any more. But more fundamentally than this, I no longer believed that Haskell was better than all the other languages out there (because I can accomplish so much more so much quicker with several other languages that I know). And this is the assumption; just hang out with the Haskell community to see this.
Drbble 14y ago
Haskell is hard because it is a very powerful and high level language, with a sophisticated compiler (type checker for highly exotic types) and runtime (lazy evaluation system, not merely a bytecode VM). Most popular languages aren't nearly as sophisticated. You can write sophisticated programs in them, but the languages aren't as sophisticated.

by igorgue 14y ago

jonathansizz 14y ago

Yes, Haskell is hard for everyone. Maybe I can speak on behalf of the stupid majority, but (having spent quite some time trying to learn Haskell) perhaps many of us who have at one time or another taken an interest have at some point ceased to find the effort worthwhile? The most annoying thing is that there seems to be an implicit assumption from a sizable part of the Haskell crowd that Haskell is demonstrably the programming pinnacle toward which all serious coders should be aiming; those of us who fall short of this goal must therefore feel chastened and embarrassed at our obvious inferiority. Well, at some point when I was grinding through Real World Haskell, trying to build software that actually did something useful, I just reached the point where I simply couldn't be bothered any more. But more fundamentally than this, I no longer believed that Haskell was better than all the other languages out there (because I can accomplish so much more so much quicker with several other languages that I know). And this is the assumption; just hang out with the Haskell community to see this.

Drbble 14y ago

Haskell is hard because it is a very powerful and high level language, with a sophisticated compiler (type checker for highly exotic types) and runtime (lazy evaluation system, not merely a bytecode VM). Most popular languages aren't nearly as sophisticated. You can write sophisticated programs in them, but the languages aren't as sophisticated.