On Fri, 2007-26-01 at 22:01 -0600, Collin Winter wrote:

I find it incredibly insulting for you to assert that people who
complain about Haskell's difficulty are too lazy and aren't really
interested in a better solution. Maybe they just don't want to have to
take graduate-level classes in category theory to get their job done.

That would be a good way to think, yes. I look for practical solutions to real problems in my work. Haskell looks like it has these solutions, but extracting them from the noise level of ivory tower debates is a real problem.

I think many of the users of Haskell forget that there are a lot of people out there who are not career academics working with pure mathematics day-in and day-out. My last math class? Was over fifteen years ago. And in, you know, the real world of programming you don't face mathematical problems as your bread and butter. You face problems in a messy world of too-short deadlines, too-few resources, too-poorly-communicated requirements and too-many-hours work.

I would like to see a guide to Haskell that shows Haskell's place in those problems, not in Yet Another Elegant Mathematical Proof of the utterly useless in real life.

Now given my privileged position of having escaped that ghetto of "toos" five years ago, I actually have the time and the energy to work this stuff out on my own. But your average working programmer? Just doesn't have the damned time to decode the arcane and obtuse wording and mathematics to get to what in the end turns out to be concepts verging on the trivial. (I'm looking at monads here....)

Maybe I'm the one that has to write the book "Haskell for the Working Programmer" sometime. You know. When I understand the language enough to write it.

--
Michael T. Richter
Email: ttmrichter@gmail.com, mtr1966@hotpop.com
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"I have never seen the poor people being so familiar with their heads of state as they were with [Michele Duvalier]. It was a beautiful lesson for me. I've learned something from it." --Mother Theresa