Günther Schmidt wrote:
I've got a problem, in short my haskell code sucks. While it does work and I do manage to use higher-orderish aspects quite extensively to make my code more concise it still is nowhere abstract, always concrete and thus always with lots of boilerplate.
Oh I have gotten better compared to when I started but on the abstraction slope I'm still stuck.
So fellows, what is the next stop on my road to enlightenment? I really think I need best to start from scratch. I think I'm sufficiently familiar now with most of Haskell's technicalities but how do I climb the ladder of abstraction?
As others said, there are already a few existing abstractions that you can take advantage of, like applicative functors, functional references (aka data-accessor) or monads; it pays to know them well. Other than that, many abstractions will probably be some kind of domain specific language. Since those are by definition specific to the problem domain, it's hard to give general advice. I'd suggest to learn from examples like Paul Hudak. The Design of a Pretty-printing Library. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/hughes95design.html Philip Wadler. A prettier printer. http://decenturl.com/homepages.inf.ed/wadler-98-prettier-printer Simon Peyton Jones, Jean-Marc Eber, Julian Seward. Composing contracts: an adventure in financial engineering. http://decenturl.com/research.microsoft/spj-financial-contracts Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com