Hello fellow Haskellers, I'd like to discuss an interesting topic. My experience is that there are two worlds in Haskell, which are quite separate: the pure, algorithmic world, where you use idiomatic pure Haskell, and the IO-driven world of state, change, threads and execution, where you use idiomatic concurrent Haskell. If you understand these two concepts well, then you are usually a good Haskell programmer. Interestingly this doesn't mean that you get applications done faster or done at all. Most languages today provide a certain "glue" to bring everything together. I think that term originates from "Why Functional Programming Matters" by John Hughes. Haskell provides a lot of low level glue like laziness, currying and other very helpful language features. But what is different in Haskell is that it doesn't seem to provide any high level glue like other languages do, especially when it comes to the IO world. There is a somewhat powerful module system, but nothing to bring modules and the objects they define together in a consistent way. In my opinion this is both a disadvantage and an advantage. It's bad because there is no standard way of gluing, nothing everybody learns and uses. On the other hand it's good, because you can make your own glue. This has proven very useful for me. My usual way is writing monad transformers and sticking them together, often together with concurrent programming. The problem with that approach is: This makes my code harder to understand for beginners. Usually they can tell /what/ my code is doing, because it's written in natural language as much as possible, but they couldn't reproduce it. And when they try to learn it, they give up fast, because you need quite some background for that. Also sometimes when I write Haskell, my friend sits beside me and watches. When he asks (as a PHP programmer with some C background), say, about my types, I can't give a brief explanation like I could in other languages. Yesterday I was writing a toy texture handler for OpenGL (for loading and selecting textures). He asked about my TextureT type. I couldn't explain it, because you couldn't even express such a thing in PHP or C. type TextureT = StateT Config -- Note that this is MonadLib. -- BaseM m IO corresponds to MonadIO m. selectTexture :: BaseM m IO => B.ByteString -> TextureT m () I fear that my code is already too difficult to understand for beginners, and it's getting worse. But then I ask myself: I've got a powerful language, so why shouldn't I use that power? After all I haven't learnt Haskell to write C code with it. And a new Haskell programmer doesn't read my code to learn Haskell. They first learn Haskell and /then/ read my code. Is this a real problem or am I just exaggerating? What do you think? Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://ertes.de/