impractical language, only useful for research. Erik Meijer at one point states that programming in Haskell is too hard and compares it to assembly programming!
He brings up a very good point. Using a monad lets you deal with side effects but also forces the programmer to specify an exact ordering. This *is* a bit like making me write assembly language programming. I have to write:
do { x <- getSomeNum y <- anotherWayToGetANum return (x + y) }
even if the computation of x and y are completely independant of each other. Yes, I can use liftM2 to hide the extra work (or fmap) but I had to artificially impose an order on the computation. I, the programmer, had to pick an order. Ok, maybe "assembly language" is a bit extreme (I get naming, allocation and garbage collection!) but it is primitive and overspecifies the problem. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/