Re: [Haskell-beginners] Left vs Right

Kool-Aid! It affects ones spelling too! LMAO On 17 April 2015 at 08:10, emacstheviking wrote:

Yeah. Learning Lisp did it for me....Haskell is super-strength Kiil-Aid baby! Drink it and be changed forever.

On 16 April 2015 at 22:22, Greg Graham wrote:

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On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 3:42 AM emacstheviking wrote:

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"Semantically, "Either left right" can be seen as a container of one or zero "right" that contains out-of-band information of type "left" when it's empty. So when you fmap over it, you only touch the content, not the out-of-band information."

Yup. Whatever he said. ;) ...that's bordering on monadic comparison tutorials if you ask me... LOL. A lot of people may not even know what "in band" and "out-of-band" even means. I grew up with X25, RS232, HDLC etc so that's ok by me. You have to be very very careful about how you explain things to people. One of my favourite videos on YouTube is some guy asking Richard Feynman how magnets work...well, he did ask! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

I am just learning Haskell, having just finished working through _Learn You a Haskell_, so I am no expert. However, the learning curve I am experience reminds me of when I went from Applesoft BASIC to Pascal, and when I went from C to C++. There was a lot of new terminology to learn such as single-entry/single exit, procedures, formal and actual parameters, encapsulation, polymorphism, early and late binding, and overloading.There were plenty of nay-sayers that claimed that these paradigms introduced unnecessary difficulties, but today you have to search far and wide for someone who advocates GOTOs, and although O-O is not universally loved, it is easily the dominant paradigm.

So, although I am still finding Haskell to be awkward for me, I am able to wrestle with it until it clicks into place, and then it's really beautiful. I feel like the benefits of the language will outweigh the effort it is taking me to learn it.

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