4 ms·

It's actually considered bad practice to omit types in Haskell for top level declarations. Unless needed, it's typically best to omit them _within_ declarations

by hawkice 12y ago

It's actually considered bad practice to omit types in Haskell for top level declarations. Unless needed, it's typically best to omit them _within_ declarations, though. I am not entirely sure why this is where the community landed, but you could get away with e.g. only providing types explicitly for exported functions, and no one would really care, I think. You can always use your IDE/repl to just tell you the types whether they are explicit or not. [EDIT: This didn't really address your core point. I'm not sure how to do that, precisely, but here is a shot. I think the ideal Haskell use case is active collaboration between the programmer and the compiler. The lack of English language docs is seen as less important than clear contracts within that interaction. I think the descriptive statement of "If you try to operate without the compiler and reason using English language understandings, Haskell will be more frustrating for you than it is for people in the Haskell community" seems both true and fair. Suffice it to say, most understanding of actual things is most easily expressed in natural language, because most communication happens in natural languages, so that's just how we hear about those ideas.]

ufo 12y ago
Another way to say this is that Haskell encourages what Rich Hickey would call "guardrail programming". The types give you hints as to how the different pieces of the program piece together. When you finally get everything to compile it should hopefully work straight away.
skybrian 12y ago
Yes, I agree. This dialog with the compiler may help library authors and library callers, but it doesn't help readers. A beginner is likely to be reading code on the Internet, in tutorials, blog posts, on stack overflow, or in papers. Perhaps a particularly active, determined reader might also try out the code they read. It's common to automatically syntax-highlight online code but not to type-annotate or cross-reference it (adding links between declarations and usages). But perhaps the tools will get better.

by hawkice 12y ago

ufo 12y ago

Another way to say this is that Haskell encourages what Rich Hickey would call "guardrail programming". The types give you hints as to how the different pieces of the program piece together. When you finally get everything to compile it should hopefully work straight away.

skybrian 12y ago

Yes, I agree. This dialog with the compiler may help library authors and library callers, but it doesn't help readers. A beginner is likely to be reading code on the Internet, in tutorials, blog posts, on stack overflow, or in papers. Perhaps a particularly active, determined reader might also try out the code they read. It's common to automatically syntax-highlight online code but not to type-annotate or cross-reference it (adding links between declarations and usages). But perhaps the tools will get better.