On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 21:59 +0000, Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
How does forcing them to learn proposed terminology such as `Appendable' help here? Learners of Haskell do still need to learn what the new word means.
The contention is that 'Appendable' is an intuitive naming that people will already have a rudimentary grasp of. This as opposed to Monoid, which absolutely requires looking up for the average coder.
In programming, -every- name requires looking up or some other way of checking meaning. Other than perhaps arithmetic operators (and I have had that bite me), I have -never- in any language written code using a name without having some assurance that it actually meant what I thought it meant. Usually you have to "look something up" to even know a name exists no matter how "intuitive" it turns out to be.