On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Philippa Cowderoy
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
If I see Monoid I know what it is, if I didn't know I could just look on Wikipedia.
And if you're a typical programmer who is now learning Haskell, this will likely make you want to run screaming and definitely be hard to understand. We at least need a description that's aimed at people who probably don't consider themselves any flavour of mathematician, however amateur. One that, while giving the definition, concentrates significantly on intuition.
Wikibooks has a patchy book on Abstract Algebra which seemed quite friendly to me (a non-mathematician and amateur FPer). I take it for granted there will be parts I don't understand but if I just continue to spot instances in the wild where they come up then it slowly becomes obvious. Collecting examples of concrete monoids is fairly easy fi you read some of the popular Haskell projects: Xmonad, Cabal, etc. I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about. No one's arguing that more documentation is a bad thing. But some people seem to think the mere existence of (a) technical terms or (b) technical terms not invented by programmers are an affront. Cheers, D