Anton van Straaten wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
Abstraction is a great thing to have. I'd just prefer it to not look
so intimidating;
What makes it look intimidating?
If the answer is "it looks intimidating because the documentation
consists of nothing more than a mathematical term, without a
definition, and a reference to a paper", then I agree with you, and it
seems so does most everyone else.
But if the intimidation factor is coming from preconceptions like
"it's mathy, therefore it's scary"; or "it's an unfamiliar term,
therefore it's scary", then I think that's something that the reader
needs to work on, not the designers and documenters of Haskell.
I guess you're right.
A problem I see a lot of [and other people have mentioned this] is that
a lot of documentation presents highly abstracted things, and gives *no
hint* of why on earth these might possibly be useful for something.
(E.g., "coarbitrary". Wuh??) Perhaps fixing this *would* help make
Haskell more accessible. (The "other" problem of course is that what
documentation that does exist is scattered all over the place...)
I still think existential quantification is a step too far though. :-P
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