Re:Ask HN: How to be fluent in functional language speak?
by mywittyname on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @05:27PM
(#23085272)
Practice programming in a functional language. They enforce a lot of restrictions that you won't be used to, and in overcoming these restrictions, you'll begin to learn and understand the reason for the jargon.
It's really hard to explain "abstraction over type constructors" in a pithy manner despite being a relatively simple statement because the obvious follow-up is "but why?" And the answer to that question isn't going to satisfy you without an understanding of the functional programming environment.
It's exactly like when novice programmers get thrown into Java land in CS101 and you have to tell the to just ignore the whole class, public, private, static, etc jargon. They need to gain experience programming in that environment to really appreciate those concepts.
It's really hard to explain "abstraction over type constructors" in a pithy manner despite being a relatively simple statement because the obvious follow-up is "but why?" And the answer to that question isn't going to satisfy you without an understanding of the functional programming environment.
It's exactly like when novice programmers get thrown into Java land in CS101 and you have to tell the to just ignore the whole class, public, private, static, etc jargon. They need to gain experience programming in that environment to really appreciate those concepts.