Lennart Augustsson wrote:
I have replied on his blog, but I'll repeat the gist of it here. Why is there a fear of using existing terminology that is exact? Why do people want to invent new words when there are already existing ones with the exact meaning that you want? If I see Monoid I know what it is, if I didn't know I could just look on Wikipedia. If I see Appendable I can guess what it might be, but exactly what does it mean?
Picture someone that doesn't yet know Haskell. If I see Appendable I can guess what it might be. If I see "monoid", I have no clue whatsoever, because I've never heard of a monoid before. Using existing terminology isn't helpful if the people using the language have never heard of it. Wikipedia's first sentence about monoids is: In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic structure with a single, associative binary operation and an identity element. Which is *not* intuitive to someone that comes from a background in.... any other programming language. A lot of communities have the "not invented here" disease -- they don't like to touch things that other people have developed. We seem to have the "not named here" disease -- we don't want to give things a sensible name for a programming language that is actually useful. Here's another, less egregious, example: isInfixOf. I would have called that function "contains" or something. Plenty of other languages have functions that do the same thing, and I can't think of one that names it anything like "isInfixOf". If you're learning Haskell, which communicates the idea more clearly: * Appendable or * Monoid I can immediately figure out what the first one means. With the second, I could refer to the GHC documentation, which does not describe what a Monoid does. Or read a wikipedia article about a branch of mathematics and try to figure out how it applies to Haskell. The GHC docs for something called Appendable could very easily state that it's a monoid. (And the docs for Monoid ought to spell out what it is in simple terms, not by linking to a 14-year-old paper.) I guess the bottom line question is: who is Haskell for? Category theorists, programmers, or both? I'd love it to be for both, but I've got to admit that Brian has a point that it is trending to the first in some areas. -- John