On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Andrew Pennebaker <andrew.penneba...@gmail.com> wrote: > [snip..] > Does anyone know of a brief introductory Haskell tutorial that engages > monads? LYAH covers monads, but it does so after a few chapters of simpler, > pure function Haskell coding. I know of some brief tutorials for monads that > explain them in a variety of creative ways, but they all assume the reader > is at least somewhat familiar with Haskell.
My opinion: you are walking down the potentially disastrous road of trying to introduce monads in as small a tutorial as yours. If the person reading the tutorial is *indeed* an evil genius, I'd at least start by showing an example of a monad that wasn't a disingenuous presentation of their full capabilities (I'm taking a long cold stare at the people who write tutorials that say "hey, Maybe is a monad, and Maybe is simple, so monads a pretty simple too!"), like the Cont monad. But, you say, "hell, Cont has quite a complex set of things going on!" And I say, yes, it's sufficiently complicated to force people to work out the underlying details. (As a side note, I've had an itching feeling to introduce monads to students via having them write an interpreter and presenting it by proxy of state based semantics in something of the spirit of Imp.) Monads are a complex subject, not overly complex, I would say "they let you chain things together and hide behavior under the rug," but even this isn't helpful to someone to hasn't seen them before. So my argument is that if you introduce monads, you do so with a great example that demonstrates a nontrivial monad (State or Cont, *not* Maybe or IO). This is a case where forcing people to work out the math is imperative (hehe, get it, it's a pun..), programmers' natural tendency when they see IO examples is to say "oh hey, I'll just copy that pattern, and that's how you do IO," where in reality this doesn't showcase everything monads really do. If you want to *link* to some good tutorials, I think that reading the "All about monads" tutorial is a great way to learn Haskell, period. Everyone in the Haskell cafe probably has a secret dream to give the best "five minute monad talk." Challenge: get someone to have a competition at one of the conferences where students all give their best "five minute monad talk" and try to find the most comprehensible one! Perhaps that was a bit of a rant, apologies if so, kris _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
