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Comment by xigoi | Hacker News Reader

It’s a mix of functional and imperative style. Most functional languages (other than Haskell) allow you to easily write code like this.

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Haskell also allows you to easily write like this

    for numbers $ \x -> do
        Console.log x
        return (x * x)

Okay and now you’re using monads which I pointed out are not easy to understand

Monads are not hard though. You use them every time you put a ? on something in Rust.

I'm not sure if this is a joke but no using something that might fulfil the laws of a monad doesn't mean you need to know what a monad is generally. Many features of imperative languages can be described using category theory, but only in Haskell do you need to actually understand the generalisation. Why is that? Why can't you just "use monads and not worry about it"? Well the problem is that in Haskell there is a huge leveraging of very general functions that apply to these entities generally, for example "fmap" ">>=" ">>" "<>", etc. and those are simple examples. Therefore understanding the rules and definition of the generalisation* is required.

It's not enough to just point at an example of a monad and say "look, the example is simple, therefore the generalisation is simple". As many philosophers have pointed out, particulars are easier to point out than universals. The latter requires a lot of thought.

I meant it sincerely, not as a joke.

> As many philosophers have pointed out, particulars are easier to point out than universals. The latter requires a lot of thought.

Fair enough, that’s a good point.

You don’t have to use >>= and >> if you don’t want to though. Use the do notation instead and the code will look much more familiar. You also mention fmap; that’s `.map` in Rust, etc. in other languages.

All I’m trying to say is, there are many parallels between Haskell and other languages at the level of particulars. The concepts behind >>= and >> are not unique to it anymore. So there is hope if you want to reconstruct the universal concepts in your mind from those particulars, especially if you use fitting abstractions like the do notation.

> All I’m trying to say is, there are many parallels between Haskell and other languages at the level of particulars.

Of course there are parallels, there must be for Haskell to be able to do what imperative languages can do. However that doesn't mean the abstractions are simple. "do notation" is another complicated generalisation and there's no way any Haskell programmer it going to be able to simply pretend that their do notation is a normal imperative language.

You seem to be asserting that I'm claiming that Haskell simply can't do the things that imperative languages can do, and I'm not at all and I don't understand how you inferred that.

> You seem to be asserting that I'm claiming that Haskell simply can't do the things that imperative languages can do

No, that’s not my intention. I responded to your view that monads are hard to understand by saying that they show up in other languages too in non-trivial ways.

I also don’t mean to say that Haskell is like imperative languages. Just that monads by themselves show up in imperative languages too, so they are not as esoteric as the operator names (>>=, >>) may make them seem.

I appreciate that you followed up in good faith. The point of view that you expressed makes sense to me.

Yes I know but that's not the point of my original post, which is about people who claim that a pure functional style would be considered easier if it were taught first. I'm saying that falling back on imperative is almost always easier than sticking with pure functional

Falling back on imperative is orthogonal to what to teach first. My original argument was that, when just starting programming, it is better to go with FP, as it is easier to learn PP or OOP additionally.

While, when starting with PP or OOP, it is incredibly hard to then learn FP.

I wasn't responding to your specific point. I was addressing this general idea that the only reason people find imperative programming easier is because they were taught it first

I write this in my Haskell day job every day.

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