Re: [Haskell-beginners] general observation about programming

As I see it, Haskell and pure functional languages aren't `necessarily' about readability so much as expressing thought in mathematical terms. The readability comes with the consistency and transparency of well-formed mathematical notation. by the way, that's transparency in laymen's sense and not referential transparency. Matthew On 26/02/2016, Dudley Brooks wrote:

One problem is that, while the symbolic operators do seem to have names (specified in the standards?) which are often sufficiently explanatory, you can find many tutorials which never even mention those names.

On 2/26/16 1:55 AM, Mike Pentney wrote:

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As a newbie, something I dislike about Haskell is the use of infix operators like <||> which are unpronouncable and therefore (if you don't happen to know the notation the symbol is based on) are more or less meaningless.

And Haskellers often seem to prefer 1 and 2 character variable names, which again convey little or no information.

And don't get me started on point-free code...!

N.B. I am not trying to start a flame war, these are just comments from my experience of trying to get beyond text-book examples and start using Haskell libraries and trying to learn from open source code. In general I find idiomatic Haskell hard to understand, and for me this is a barrier to using Haskell for real projects. Maybe someday I'll have learnt enough to get past this problem, but as the language and libraries seem to evolve quickly, I have my doubts...

On 25/02/16 19:19, Jeffrey Brown wrote:

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Something I like about functional programming is how it interfaces with natural language. Haskell, somehow to a greater extent than other languages, encourages me to divide functions into one or two-liners. Each has a type signature that means something in English. Further, each gives you the opportunity to choose a good name for the function and its arguments. After doing those things, the function is much easier to write, and much easier to read -- so much so that often you don't have to read the function body at all, just the type signature, function name and argument names.

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 8:17 AM, Dudley Brooks mailto:dbrooks@runforyourlife.org> wrote:

Ages and ages ago I saw this advice about programming:

Q: "What's the best language for a programmer to know?"

A: "English" (or whatever your native language is)

-- Dudley

On 2/24/16 4:03 PM, Dennis Raddle wrote:

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This is more about programming in general than Haskell, although Haskellers probably know it well.

I don't claim to have expert knowledge on this, but I'm gradually getting better at it.

When I set out to write a program, or refactor a program, or modify a program, it helps to set out my thinking in a clear way. And how I make it clear is to document my thoughts.

An outline is one good way to organize thoughts and is probably my main tool. But good English prose is also helpful.

The key factor is "editing." In what sense do I mean that? Good writers do it, and the Haskell documentation does it. I mean (1) brevity and (2) good flow. To achieve brevity, you must think about the essence of each statement and trim away the unnecessary stuff. Good flow refers to how the document builds up and modifies your concepts as you read it. A document can actually mirror an effective learning process, or influence and change your process.

I work with my documentation, making several editing passes. By the time I'm done, I am in a great position to write a concise and flexible program.

It's interesting that not only is Haskell a concise language, but the Haskell library documentation is concise. Contrast that with the Python documentation which often wanders about into areas that are irrelevant--it could easily be cut into one third its present size.

Mike

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-- Jeffrey Benjamin Brown

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