From: Karl von Laudermann <doodpants@...>
Date: 2005-10-01T00:21:47+09:00
Subject: Re: In your opinion....

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> You'll find out Haskell is quite a different beast. It has interesting
> features, but it doesn't have much in common with imperative languages
> like Ruby. Its IO model is �bercool though (completely functional, which
> is quite a feat, and basically making IO actions into objects rather
> than actions. But if you really want to understand how it works, you
> need to understand the monad, which is quite an esoteric mathematical
> notion - and I'm someone who used to eat distributions for breakfast, so
> abstract mathematical notions normally don't frighten me ;) -).

I certainly don't understand the monad. I read some introductory
material re: Haskell just a couple of weeks ago, out of curiosity about
the language. My understanding of the monad concept and Haskell's use
thereof is basically this:

- Haskell is a purely functional language
- Purely functional languages cannot have side effects
- A language that can't do I/O is useless, so we need a way to put side
effects into a purely functional language
Therefore:
- We'll put I/O subroutines into Haskell, *but* we'll call them
"monads", and that magically fixes the problem somehow

I'm sure that my understanding is wrong, but that's what I came away
with.