I'm really tickled by the reaction to this comment on places like reddit. Especially how all the Haskell apologists are rushing to the defense of their language even though it's obvious that no Haskell programmer UNDERSTANDS the language, especially the type system.
Not exaggerating here. To confirm it, ask them about monads. Here's a conversation I had with an expert Haskell programmer, edited for length and spelling: Him: A functor is a type with a method for taking a "container" and applying a function to its contents, and returning a container the same size with the return values of those function applications Me: We have that. It's called map. Him: Yes Him: In Haskell it's called fmap Him: So a monad is that, plus two other methods Him: return takes a single value and makes a container with that value in it Him: join takes a container of the same kind of container and flattens them Me: ... Him: So the container Me: Then monads are just data structures Him: Well no Me: Lists are monads, right? Me: So why isn't "Monad" called "DataStructure" Him: Correct, but Him: Well that's what it's called in category theory He went on to talk about monoids and applicatives. What he was trying to say without actually admitting it was that these things have weird names just for the sake of making everything more complicated than it needs to be. This, people, is what you get when you design a language around a type system: Meddlers with PhDs in category theory, making desperate grabs for job security. Actually, it's an established fact that a type system is never one of the interesting or useful parts of a language, and that's why I stick to languages which don't have a type system in the first place. On Jul 19, 10:20 pm, Mark Engelberg <mark.engelb...@gmail.com> wrote: > As a side note, years ago, I wanted to write something in Haskell that > worked like Clojure's memoize (which is implemented in a half-dozen or > so lines of code in Clojure's core), and asked about it on the Haskell > mailing list. I was pointed to a PhD dissertation on the topic of how > to write memoize in Haskell. All I could think was, "Do I really want > to be using a language where memoize is a PhD-level topic?" -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
