Hmm, perhaps what we need is another monad tutorial that.....err...never mind. Actually, I'd like to see more written about Applicatives. I think they just finally clicked with me when reading the Typeclassopedia, and seeing the intended way to use them. Before it was always like "ok...so, if I've got a function already in my functor, I could use this, but...why would I have that?"
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 10:28 AM, Thomas Davie <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 12 Mar 2009, at 15:16, Andrew Wagner wrote: > > Can you expand on this a bit? I'm curious why you think this. >> > > For two reasons: > > Firstly, I often find that people use the Monadic interface when one of the > less powerful ones is both powerful enough and more convenient, parsec is a > wonderful example of this. When the applicative instance is used instead of > the monadic one, programs rapidly become more readable, because they stop > describing the order in which things should be parsed, and start describing > the grammar of the language being parsed instead. > > Secondly, It seems relatively common now for beginners to be told about the > IO monad, and start writing imperative code in it, and thinking that this is > what Haskell programming is. I have no problem with people writing > imperative code in Haskell, it's an excellent imperative language. However, > beginners seeing this, and picking it up is usually counter productive – > they never learn how to write things in a functional way, and miss out on > most of the benefits of doing so. > > Hope that clarifies what I meant :) > > Bob
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