Re:Haskell in Production
by microtherion on Friday October 18, 2019 @05:36PM
(#21295272)
Thanks for your explanations! 2&4 make a lot of sense. 1, and even more so 3, lead to more questions than they answer, in my opinion. Monads appear to be an absolutely indispensible aspect of most substantial Haskell programs, but to me, they just look incomprehensible. I understand the advantages of a pure programming model for formal reasoning about programs, but in terms of communicating an intent with a program, I can't help thinking that the cure offered by Monads is far worse than the disease of mutable state.
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The advantage of monads is that they whisk away a bunch of boring, repetitive boilerplate code that nobody wants to write and that people will even go so far in other languages as to create a bunch of global/thread-local/hidden-context variables to avoid writing!
The downside is that the abstraction and its applications, maybe a bit like pointers, do take a while to really master. Particularly when you start composing monad types to make other monads, as Scotty does with IO.