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Yeah, that makes sense. The author's terminology/wording wasn't clear/helpful IMO. Beyond that, though - the above code looks great - until you need to debug i

Yeah, that makes sense. The author's terminology/wording wasn't clear/helpful IMO. Beyond that, though - the above code looks great - until you need to debug it. Personally, I'd rather pay a 'naming tax' on things for the sake of readability / debugability over what the original author is shooting for any day.

mbrock 11y ago
I haven't needed to debug it very much. Thankfully, it's easy to insert debugging helpers at any stage of the pipeline.
- king_magic 11y ago
  Interesting, maybe I'm just less familiar with debugging in Haskell.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    This is kind of a special scenario since what's described in the pipeline is already an I/O action, which makes it easy to insert logging anywhere (e.g., a "tap" component that prints its input and output w/ timestamp). Such pipelines aren't necessarily made up of I/O actions though; they can also be pure computations, which cannot perform side-effects such as logging. In that case, you can still insert debugging helpers, but you might need to be slightly creative. For example, if your pipeline generates a list of values, you could put debugging entries into that list. Generally, though, the saving grace in such a case is that each component will be a pure transformation, which means that you can easily call it with a test input and inspect the output. There are some step-by-step debugging tools for Haskell, but I haven't used them, and Haskell programmers mostly seem uninterested in that way of debugging. It doesn't fit very well with Haskell's evaluation model anyway. When I work with Haskell, I just debug in a different way, focusing on verifying correctness of functions and their combinations.
    - codygman 11y ago
      > There are some step-by-step debugging tools for Haskell, but I haven't used them, and Haskell programmers mostly seem uninterested in that way of debugging. It doesn't fit very well with Haskell's evaluation model anyway. When I work with Haskell, I just debug in a different way, focusing on verifying correctness of functions and their combinations. I created hs-scrape[0] to write web scrapers and I frequently use the ghci debugger[1] for step-by-step debugging. 0: https://github.com/codygman/hs-scrape/ https://github.com/codygman/hs-scrape/ 1: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/ghci-debugger.html https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_gu...
KingMob 11y ago
The post was for Clojure Gazette, and all Clojure programmers would be familiar with the threading functions. I have to say, minimizing intermediate holding names makes debugging and writing clear code much easier. 97% of the time, I never miss the "naming tax".

mbrock 11y ago

I haven't needed to debug it very much. Thankfully, it's easy to insert debugging helpers at any stage of the pipeline.

king_magic 11y ago
Interesting, maybe I'm just less familiar with debugging in Haskell.
- mbrock 11y ago
  This is kind of a special scenario since what's described in the pipeline is already an I/O action, which makes it easy to insert logging anywhere (e.g., a "tap" component that prints its input and output w/ timestamp). Such pipelines aren't necessarily made up of I/O actions though; they can also be pure computations, which cannot perform side-effects such as logging. In that case, you can still insert debugging helpers, but you might need to be slightly creative. For example, if your pipeline generates a list of values, you could put debugging entries into that list. Generally, though, the saving grace in such a case is that each component will be a pure transformation, which means that you can easily call it with a test input and inspect the output. There are some step-by-step debugging tools for Haskell, but I haven't used them, and Haskell programmers mostly seem uninterested in that way of debugging. It doesn't fit very well with Haskell's evaluation model anyway. When I work with Haskell, I just debug in a different way, focusing on verifying correctness of functions and their combinations.
  - codygman 11y ago
    > There are some step-by-step debugging tools for Haskell, but I haven't used them, and Haskell programmers mostly seem uninterested in that way of debugging. It doesn't fit very well with Haskell's evaluation model anyway. When I work with Haskell, I just debug in a different way, focusing on verifying correctness of functions and their combinations. I created hs-scrape[0] to write web scrapers and I frequently use the ghci debugger[1] for step-by-step debugging. 0: https://github.com/codygman/hs-scrape/ https://github.com/codygman/hs-scrape/ 1: https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/ghci-debugger.html https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_gu...

KingMob 11y ago

The post was for Clojure Gazette, and all Clojure programmers would be familiar with the threading functions. I have to say, minimizing intermediate holding names makes debugging and writing clear code much easier. 97% of the time, I never miss the "naming tax".