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Comment by unhammer | Hacker News Reader

> These misunderstandings let people write clumsy code like do putStrLn "text"

Is it really a problem that newcomers write things like that? It doesn't make the program any slower or more buggy. It's trivial for a code-reviewer to fix. If the new haskellers have hlint installed, they'll get a hint to simplify it and eventually they'll learn the idiomatic way. (And the readFile/writeFile example was just fine before being "fixed".)

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For me, that's similar to writing

  if(var == true) {

  }

It's more verbose than necessary, but not wrong.

In Python and JavaScript it is also asserting the type of the thing being compared, which, I argue is better code style. It is a mess having to think about all those things being truish.

> they'll get a hint to simplify it and eventually they'll learn the idiomatic way.

I can confirm that, the recent IntelliJ Haskell (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8258-intellij-haskell) does a pretty good job notifying beginners about redundant "do" blocks and eta-reduction possibilities (with a help from HLint). The redundant blocks are even highlighted in real-time right on the editor.

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