On May 28, 2007, at 5:39 , Andrew Coppin wrote:

I like to think I'm an intelligent, but... maybe I'm just kidding myself...

Haskell's good at making people feel stupid. :) Just a little background, btw: I'm no mathie, in fact I have some problems with math for various reasons. Nor am I a CS researcher. I'm a career system administrator who got into computing as a teenager back when schools didn't offer computing courses and *certainly* didn't offer CS theory courses. So I'm pretty close to the opposite of Haskell's "target audience" --- yet I find it useful and see productivity gains from using it (modulo the learning curve). One of the nice things about Haskell is that you don't need to understand category theory to use monads, or advanced type theory to use GADTs or rank-N polymorphism. You *do* need to learn what they're good for --- but this is really no different than any other language. It's just that most other languages don't pack so many features into so small a space, because they don't have Haskell's expressiveness; this can be both blessing (you can do in libraries what other languages have to hardcode into the language) and curse (wrapping your head around e.g. GADTs or monads). -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH