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>when looking at a bit of code I can tell what it does without having to know much about the context How do type classes make that harder? You either need to

• more_original 13y ago
  You need to know the type. I wouldn't want to say that makes reading code "hard", but it means that you need more context in order to understand the code. (Imagine, for example, that you're trying to understand a patch, where not all types are obvious).
  • papsosouid 13y ago
    You only need more context in order to know where to look to understand the code. If you don't know what foo does, you have to go look at the definition of foo. If foo is obvious or common, then you don't care which instance's version of foo is being called. To a person reading the code, + is + regardless of whether it is adding ints or floats. If you are looking at a patch and don't know what a function does, then you need to go look at the actual code. In which case, the types are now obvious (or can be given to you by the compiler if they are not obvious). Are there alternative approaches I am not aware of? All I can see is encode the type in the name of the function (fmapList, fmapMaybe, fMapVector, etc), or forcing the functions to all be in separate namespaces and have to qualify them (List.fmap, Maybe.fmap, etc). Both seem much worse than typeclasses.