I have replied on his blog, but I'll repeat the gist of it here.
Why is there a fear of using existing terminology that is exact?
Why do people want to invent new words when there are already existing
ones with the exact meaning that you want?
If I see Monoid I know what it is, if I didn't know I could just look
on Wikipedia.
If I see Appendable I can guess what it might be, but exactly what does it mean?
-- Lennart
On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:34 PM, John Goerzen
Hi folks,
Don Stewart noticed this blog post on Haskell by Brian Hurt, an OCaml hacker:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2009/01/15/random-thoughts-on-haskell/
It's a great post, and I encourage people to read it. I'd like to highlight one particular paragraph:
One thing that does annoy me about Haskell- naming. Say you've noticed a common pattern, a lot of data structures are similar to the difference list I described above, in that they have an empty state and the ability to append things onto the end. Now, for various reasons, you want to give this pattern a name using on Haskell's tools for expressing common idioms as general patterns (type classes, in this case). What name do you give it? I'd be inclined to call it something like "Appendable". But no, Haskell calls this pattern a "Monoid". Yep, that's all a monoid is- something with an empty state and the ability to append things to the end. Well, it's a little more general than that, but not much. Simon Peyton Jones once commented that the biggest mistake Haskell made was to call them "monads" instead of "warm, fluffy things". Well, Haskell is exacerbating that mistake. Haskell developers, stop letting the category theorists name things. Please. I beg of you.
I'd like to echo that sentiment!
He went on to add:
If you?re not a category theorists, and you're learning (or thinking of learning) Haskell, don't get scared off by names like "monoid" or "functor". And ignore anyone who starts their explanation with references to category theory- you don't need to know category theory, and I don't think it helps.
I'd echo that one too.
-- John _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe