On Sun, 2007-28-01 at 15:39 +0000, Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
Right.  If it had been called the "Binding Chain Design Pattern" then no one
would have gone nuts over the fact it had anything to do with advanced math.

But this design pattern was not trivial: it took years to standardize on using a
Monad for IO in Haskell.  This may have been a result of too small a community
of users.

No design pattern worth using (under any paradigm!) was trivial to create.  But you're right on the head with the naming.  Calling it a "Monad" and referring to an "obscure branch of mathematics" every time you talk about it is just not the way to sell the pattern.  My 2001-or-so rejection of Haskell had a lot to do with running into that "obscure branch" phrase far too often for my own mental health.

> Maybe I'm the one that has to write the book "Haskell for the Working
> Programmer" sometime.  You know.  When I understand the language enough
> to write it.

You could start small by adding sections to the learning and tutorial pages at
the wiki...

I could, yes.  Except the stuff that I can document there is already documented.  Actually much of what I think Haskell needs documented is already documented.  It just needs to be put together into a coherent whole so prospective users aren't left sifting through a myriad of sources to find the few understandable (to them) gems.  And having a cookbook of practical solutions wouldn't hurt either along the lines of the Ruby Cookbook or Python Cookbook or, hell, even the MySQL Cookbook.

-- 
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter@gmail.com, mtr1966@hotpop.com
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"Sexual organs were created for reproduction between the male element and the female element -- and everything that deviates from that is not acceptable from a Buddhist point of view. Between a man and man, a woman and another woman, in the mouth, the anus, or even using a hand." --The Dalai Lama