Thorkil Naur wrote:
Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
It is rather funny. When we are young kids, we learn weird symbols like
A B C a b c 1 2 3
which we accept after a while.
But Functor, Monoid or Monad, that we cannot accept anymore. Why, because these are not intuitive? Are the symbols above "intuitive"?
I think there is a simple explanation of this: Consider the amount of time you spent, as a young kid, to learn to get used to these funny 1, 2, a, b, x, y, +, - and so on. I haven't got the exact schedules from school, but my impression is that we are talking about hours and hours of drill and practice, over weeks, months, years.
So, to learn to become familiar and effective in using new and complex concepts, we should just accept that it sometimes may take a while. And that's it. It is all a matter of practice, exposure, and guidance.
That's a highly relevant wisdom! Learning something new needs practice / time and good tutors / books / guidance. It doesn't matter whether the new thing is "alphabet", "summation", "boolean", "programming" or "monoid". Obviously, those who know what a monoid is have already invested years of time practicing mathematics while those that even attack the name "monoid" clearly lack this practice. It's like peano virtuosoes compared to beginning keyboard pressers. Concerning the question whether it is necessary to invest at least some time on mathematical practice to learn Haskell, the answer is yes. There is no shortcut to learning purely functional programming and reasoning. Renaming "monoid" to "appendable" and "monad" to "warm fuzzy thing" are but useless cosmetic changes that don't make anything easier. How to learn? The options are, in order of decreasing effectiveness university course teacher in person book irc mailing list online tutorial haskell wiki haddock documentation Usually, the best thing is to have a teacher, i.e. to go to a good CS course on Haskell. Books and #haskell or the mailing list are a good substitute, but require self-discipline. Both teachers and books cost money, but you get what you pay for, the online tutorial, wiki and haddock worlds are too messy to be effective until very late in the learning process. In particular, monoids are defined and used in Richard Bird. Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskel (2nd edition). http://www.amazon.com/ Introduction-Functional-Programming-using-Haskell/dp/0134843460 I think that this book is a good benchmark for measuring the amount of practice to be invested in learning Haskell. Regards, H. Apfelmus