Manlio Perillo complained about:
buildPartitions xs ns = zipWith take ns . init . scanl (flip drop) xs $ ns
Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
takeList = evalState . mapM (State . splitAt)
Ha! Bravo! As the author of the offending zipWith/scanl version, I can say that love those State monad one-liners. However, ironically, I stopped using them for pretty much the same reason that Manlio is saying. The difference is that zipWith and scanl are classic Haskell idioms that any Haskell programmer will learn fairly early on. Whereas State monad one-liners used to be thought of as new and fancy and esoteric. But now they are becoming more mainstream, so perhaps I should go back to them. So the bottom line is that Manlio is right, really. It's just that Haskell is still very different than what most programmers are used to. So it does take a while to get a feeling for what is "too smart". Yitz