Conal,Do you think imperative Haskell can be a sort of "gateway drug" to "real" haskell?
On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Conal Elliott <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you Bob! I'll throw in another 2 cents: > > Yes, *one* aspect of Haskell is that it's a power tool for imperative > programming -- a clever way to keep plugging away at the old sequential von > Neumann paradigm. C++++. > > I'd rather we strongly encourage Haskell-newbies toward shifting out of the > imperative paradigm to thinking and programming *functionally*. It's a big > shift, to make, and imperative-Haskell is a relatively easy substitute. > > - Conal > > On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 7:28 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_______________________________________________ >> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >> > >
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