On 2013-08-11, at 11:45 AM, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley@gmail.com> wrote:

I tend to see OO subtyping and heterogeneous collections as more an impediment to (pure) functional integration with the "rest-of-the-world" than state. There are a lot of quality wrappers to stateful C libraries from Haskell, but few to object oriented C++ or Objective C libraries.

That may be true. And, state and OO types are different issues. I guess I conflated the two because the stateful OS X libraries I use are largely implemented using Cocoa or sometimes C data structures. So, do I make my own Haskell list or record or type representing something in the API, or just access the Cocoa one? etc. etc.

Also, in truth I introduced a totally separate gripe, which is that I find monads and monad transformers to be a hell of a messy and difficult way to deal with state. Sometimes I get sick of all the layering in monad transformers and hand-roll my own monad with all the stuff. But it just seems baroquely difficult. Perhaps I was just to set in my ways when I came to FP, and cannot really "get it". There are things I have never looked into such as FRP, but maybe my poor old brain is just not up to it. Maybe I should have been a janitor or a car salesman.

- P -



On 11 August 2013 16:10, Philippe Sismondi <psismondi@arqux.com> wrote:


As a result of this little thread I have come to another conclusion, and this is just my subjective view. Most of the software that I am interested in seems to live most comfortably with a stateful conception of the world. (The native libraries I find most useful certainly are stateful.) I am reasonably competent with monads and monad transformers in Haskell. But, to be honest, after three years of pluggin away at Haskell, I am not the least convinced that the problem of handling a changing external world in a pure functional language has been successfully solved by those techniques. I always feel as though I am using the robot arm on a space shuttle when a screwdriver would do. (Again, no need to rebut this - I may be wrong or just to stupid to use Haskell effectively - so be it.)

Perhaps in the end I do not really believe that functional programming is the panacea that its devotees claim it to be.


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