David Place wrote:
It's hGetContents that bothers me. I have found that friends who I have convinced to learn Haskell always trip over this right away. They want to write a simple program that processes a file and immediately get tangled up with lazy IO and looking up the definition of deepseq. It's kind of embarrassing.
There's nothing to be embarrassed about. Haskell is lazy by default. That is certainly much different than what most people are used to. So it needs to be explained to beginners. It's the same for IO laziness as for pure laziness. I'd much rather explain that, which fits in with the whole style of Haskell, than to have to explain Iteratees to a newcomer. In any case, you can't expect the switch from Python to Haskell to go nearly as smoothly as the switch from Perl to Python. The paradigm shift is much bigger. -Yitz