nrinaudo

Introduction

I was recently asked to explain why I felt disappointed by Haskell, as a language. And, well. Crucified for crucified, I might as well criticise Haskell publicly.

First though, I need to make it explicit that I claim no particular skill with the language - I will in fact vehemently (and convincingly!) argue that I'm a terrible Haskell programmer. And what I'm about to explain is not meant as The Truth, but my current understanding, potentially flawed, incomplete, or flat out incorrect. I welcome any attempt at proving me wrong, because when I dislike something that so many clever people worship, it's usually because I missed an important detail.

Another important point is that this is not meant to convey the idea that Haskell is a bad language. I do feel, however, that the vocal, and sometimes aggressive, reverence in which it's held might lead people to have unreasonable expectations. It certainly was my case, and the reason I'm writing this.

Type classes

I love the concept of type class

lexi-lambda

Monads and delimited control are very closely related, so it isn’t too hard to understand them in terms of one another. From a monadic point of view, the big idea is that if you have the computation m >>= f, then f is m’s continuation. It’s the function that is called with m’s result to continue execution after m returns.

If you have a long chain of binds, the continuation is just the composition of all of them. So, for example, if you have

m >>= f >>= g >>= h

then the continuation of m is f >=> g >=> h. Likewise, the continuation of m >>= f is g >=> h.