On 11/09/2007, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:

To me, Haskell was a bit like climbing a mountain which is largely covered by fog; you don't see anything until you've climbed high enough, and then the view is really beautiful ;-)

Either that or: the foothills are glorious, but as soon as you get into the higher altitudes you can fall down a monad and not be able to escape... D.

Dougal Stanton wrote:

On 11/09/2007, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:

...

To me, Haskell was a bit like climbing a mountain which is largely covered by fog; you don't see anything until you've climbed high enough, and then the view is really beautiful ;-)

Either that or: the foothills are glorious, but as soon as you get into the higher altitudes you can fall down a monad and not be able to escape...

At the risk of being told to STHU again... somebody should collect these things and keep them somewhere!

Dan Piponi wrote:

On 9/11/07, Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

you can fall down a monad and not be able to escape...

It's not so bad. It's in the nature of monads that after you've fallen in once, you can never get trapped any deeper.

But you can climb higher... (Note: Best viewed in mono-space!) Programmer's Nirvana plane --------------- Categoric plane --------------- Co-Monadic plane (Co- everything) ----------------- Applicative plane ---------------------- Pointless-pointfree plane ------------------------------ Monadic plane (don't get trapped) --------------- --------------- Functional plane (Haskell et al!) --------------- --------------- Imperative plane ASM, C#, Java :) --------------- --------------- Physical plane (e.g. Silicon) -- Ron

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 16:55 +0000, Gracjan Polak wrote:

clisper writes:

...

haskell is greate but i don't know how to start.

Don't!

Learning Haskell will change your world! For worse! Really! Don't do that, you still have time to go back! Or be damned like all of us here...

Referential transparency will suck up your soul. You'll think about monads as your warm and fuzzy friends. You'll wash your hands after doing IO because you'll feel that your purity suffered.

You'll consider unit testing a downgraded form of static typing. When your programs finally compile, they will magically just work. You'll write less and less KLOC, doing more at the same time.

Your C#/C++/Java code will look like higher order code after first order transformation done by hand. Your co-workers and friends will not understand what you wrote any more. You'll be like a wizard from another planet for them.

You will know the difference between foldl and foldr.

And never to use either one. Long live foldl'!

All your data structures will be infinite in size. Space leaks will bite you hard. Your functions will be not lazy enough in some arguments and not strict enough in some others at the same time. And even seq will not help you.

You'll know what MPTCs and GADTs are. You'll actually understand olegs posts. You'll wonder, what was that OO thing again? You'll take out Java from your CV.

Take a friendly advice: go back and forget that you ever heard about Haskell!

jcc