On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 12:08 AM, Eli Barzilay <e...@barzilay.org> wrote: > 6 minutes ago, Asumu Takikawa wrote: >> A few of us in the lab today were discussing how the Haskell >> community has this nice tool called Hoogle >> (http://www.haskell.org/hoogle) that lets you search Haskell docs by >> type. > > Are there any *practical* uses for that thing?
Hoogle is very popular among the Haskell community, and regularly used by experienced programmers and as a resource neophytes are pointed to. > (Not a flame, I tried it a few times, and it looked like i might be > useful in a language where you use point-free style to compose > functions -- so you might know the type that you need `(a -> b -> c) > -> (b -> c -> a)' but not the `flip' name. But such serches don't > see, to work. So from this shallow scan, it looks like one of these > things that sound cool on paper, but are useless in practice.) The correct type for flip would have yielded more useful results: <http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=%28a+-%3E+b+-%3E+c%29+-%3E+%28b+-%3E+a+-%3E+c%29> On the teaching side, how much use students get out of hoogle varies a lot. Some students struggle to get to the point where they can adequately formulate the types they want, leaving hoogle a rather pointless exercise somewhat akin to the frustration of a child using a dictionary to look up how to spell a word (e.g. how can I find it if I can't spell it?). Other students who embrace the specification-side of programming seem to use it in an exploratory manner as much as a name lookup service (e.g. this type seems interesting, I wonder if it's a thing...). Anthony _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev
