On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Manlio Perillo <manlio_perillo@libero.it> wrote:

Conal Elliott ha scritto:

Another helpful strategy for the reader is to get smarter, i.e. to invest effort in rising to the level of the writer. Or just choose a different book if s/he prefers. - Conal

This strategy is doomed to failure, unfortunately.
We live in the real world, compromises are necessary.

It depends, IMO. Making changes to the programming style one uses, in particular ones such as you propose, would ultimate lead to programs in haskell being less flexible and/or powerful than if they are. I'm a bit new to haskell myself, but I do understand that one of the primary uses cases and/or motivating factors for using Haskell is when you really just NEED that extra abstraction and power you get from being able to do these types of things. Someone once said that "simple problems should be simple and difficult problems should be possible". That doesn't mean the difficult problems become EASY. One of the best uses for haskell is solving difficult problems. It's obviously still going to be difficult to solve, and as such the writer (and hence by extension the reader) is going to have to be smart as well.

C++ is actually beginning to suffer the complexity problem as well, especially with C++0x, but I fundamentally disagree with the added complexity in C++, specifically because it is a language which is supposed to excel at solving solve all kinds of problems. Haskell excels at solving difficult problems, so I don't think the target audience for Haskell necessarily needs to include people who can't figure out difficult code. C++ otoh they need to agree on a target audience or set of problems that it's geared toward, and then either s**t or get off the pot. It's fine if they keep adding complexity until the cows come home, but just agree up front that that's what it is and programmers who aren't cut out for it use a different language. With Haskell I think you have that up-front agreement, so there's no problem.