On 8/14/07, Dan Weston
Conor McBride and Ross Paterson said it best in the introduction to their paper "Applicative programming with effects" [1]:
As von Neumann said: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand
things, you just get used to them."
Getting used to something is, practically by definition, something
that you can't do just by reading the ultimate tutorial. You just have
to write the code, see the pattern happen again and again, and
abstract it. There's no short cut. (Well...sometimes...)
On 8/14/07, Michael Vanier
I'm reminded of a physics teacher who was having a similar problem explaining the concept of tensors, until he said that "a tensor is something that transforms like a tensor does!".
Grrr...must...hold...my...tongue... -- Dan