Re: [Haskell-cafe] IO is a bad example for Monads

On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Paul Moore wrote:

On 10/12/2007, Henning Thielemann wrote:

...

I raise my question once again: Must Haskell's tutorials be tailored to impatient programmers? Does Haskell need quick&dirty hackers?

Haskell is the most practical functional language I have encountered, but I still feel that IO (in the most general sense of interaction with the outside world) is hard in Haskell[1]. Maybe it *can* be easy, but it isn't yet. And ignoring that fact isn't helping anyone.

I myself didn't start with IO in Haskell, because I could do this in imperative languages. I didn't learnt Haskell in order to be able to implement something, that I couldn't program before. I used Haskell for implementing things more cleaner, more elegant than before. Things that I couldn't implement more elegant in Haskell, I didn't implement in Haskell. I started in Haskell with what is especially easy to do in Haskell, for me this was solving mathematical problems. GHCi was the way I interacted with Haskell. I didn't do IO for more than half a year. My first programs with IO only contained writing data to files, then reading from files. No interaction with the user or argument parsing. Due to Hal Daume's tutorial I found the State monad useful early. Later I did IO, Reader, List monad and then monad transformers. In retrospective, the List monad should have been earlier on my plan because it is the right tool for solving problems by systematic search. I think that getting a job done (maybe even with time constraint) is not a good way to really learn a language. You will try to solve the problems in the way you solved them in other languages, because that is the way you are used to, and this promises to be the fastest one.