61–70 of 123 posts
Haskell is such a great language. I've been recommending this book for a while now. If you are in doubt whether you should start learning it, read this post by Jeff Bone: http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0441... After I read it, I immediately began learning Haskell. Since then, Haskell made my brain melt multiple times. But it has also enabled me to build an expression parser and analytic diffe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems as though individuals who don't want to feel bad about their weight and gender might also feel that LYAH is not the place to look. I guess LYAH and I just aren't a good "culture fit." It's a real shame too -- without these completely unnecessary comments that add no value, this is an excellent way to learn Haskell! I've become comfortable with my whale-like properties and I'm male, so I had the lovely privil…
I feel like some time in the 90s, people got this idea in their head that their sensitivities should be everyone's problem. Since you exhibit this, can you explain why? I'm super curious.
This might not be the case if there's a downside to the alternative language, or if the feeling of offense is unreasonable, but this is a decision you should actively make, not passively dismiss as "not my problem".
In this case, I think the language could easily have been changed without significantly weakening the text.
I always have been interested on haskell.... but it doesn't look to be enough practical. For example there is almost no information about how to write a smartphone videogame in haskell, even if it possible to trasnpile it to C or to Javascript. It is possible to interoperate with the host language? Does it perform well for high performance activities? Is it possible to isolate some kind of events in a thread? Edit: T…
> For example there is almost no information about how to write a smartphone videogame in haskell, even if it possible to trasnpile it to C or to Javascript. These guys are doing it pretty seriously: http://keera.co.uk/blog/all-posts/ And frankly a smartphone videogame is a pretty specialized use case; a lot of pretty mainstream languages (perl?) don't have a good story for how to do that. In fact I've never heard of…
Should I learn oCaml instead ? Looks appealing because companies like Facebook are using it create tools like Flow ( https://github.com/facebook/flow ).
Haskell is such a great language. I've been recommending this book for a while now. If you are in doubt whether you should start learning it, read this post by Jeff Bone: http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0441... After I read it, I immediately began learning Haskell. Since then, Haskell made my brain melt multiple times. But it has also enabled me to build an expression parser and analytic diffe…
I'm not sure if that link is NSFW or not :)
Although, I think, if someone reads it who's not familiar with programming languages, the reactions, when you tell them what Haskell and Python are, might range from hilarious to WTF.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly the author is going for a casual, conversational, jocular attitude. That's part of what makes LYAH so approachable. If you want dry, sanitized, bowdlerized instruction, LYAH is not the place to look.
It's possible to communicate in a casual, conversational, and humorous manner without alienating minorities and delivering insults, and the author chose not to. I think it's unlikely that he was trying to be malicious and is probably just not sensitive to what it's like to be on the receiving end of some of his examples.
While I respect your sensibility, I would have made the same kind of remarks without thinking it would hurt someone. I understand it could, but it wouldn't have been my intent. Also remember that your position is very very US-centric. But I am all for communication : explain your point to the author and propose something else that is as funny as the current text.
But saying the author chose not to is simply dishonest.
What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.
The original monad papers, by Philip Wadler. Accept no substitutes. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/monads.html http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/ Alternatively, if you really are allergic to LaTeX, or beards, the recently Oscared sigfpe’s “You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)” http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad... There are no other monad tutorials. J…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to really understand monads to use them. Not at first anyway. They're basically just containers that allow you to use side effects, hold state, etc... https://acm.wustl.edu/functional/io-monad.jpg
>They're basically just containers that allow you to use side effects, hold state, etc... No, that is one use for Monads. A Monad is just something that has a bind (>>=) function and a return function.
You realise that this is the most useless description ever? While I'm sure it's right, it doesn't actually mean anything. Why's it a good abstraction for doing , better than any other abstraction? If it abstracts over a gazillion different things, why not have special-purpose abstractions like other languages (and thus probably make the language a lot simpler to use)?
Your description is on the same level as "programming languages are structured text".
This book was excellent for helping me learn Haskell, but the gendered language and fat-shaming jokes made me feel very uncomfortable, eg: "You're fat! Lose some weight, fatty!","You're supposedly normal. Pffft, I bet you're ugly!" and "You're a whale, congratulations!", "Sure, we could just type them all out but obviously that's not a solution for gentlemen who demand excellence from their programming languages."
You're absolutely right, as a transfat HAES advocate genderqueer, I feel extremely triggered by the author's fat-phobic and gender-normative oppression. The author needs to check his privileges and rephrase to: "You're healthy at every size! Continue being body positive, healthy!", "You're supposed normal. Pfft, society has an unrealistic standard of beauty!" and "You're absolutely perfect with no flaws, defects, or…
Should I learn oCaml instead ? Looks appealing because companies like Facebook are using it create tools like Flow ( https://github.com/facebook/flow ).
https://github.com/facebook/Haxl
My 2 cents: definitely _also_ learn OCaml down the line. But:
- my pet peeve with OCaml is the lack of a builtin type for Unicode strings (the only other language still commonly used with this shortcoming is PHP), and this could be an issue if you plan to write some web app code that needs to be internationalized
- OCaml is strict, Haskell is one of the very few languages that is non-strict: aside from the didactic purpose of exposing yoursefl to something different, that's a feature that can help reasoning about what your code is doing:
http://augustss.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-...
(then again, there're obviously downsides to non-strictness, and you might decide down the line that you prefer to write strict code in production... but it's good to know the alternatives)