Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the land of Haskell

Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by draven on Thursday March 12, 2015 @07:12AM (#9190035)

I guess it goes like this: at first you don't understand a particular construct (pointfree style, monads.) Then when you kinda get it you tend to apply this new tool to everything. After a while it just get "downgraded" to its right place: just another useful tool in your programmer's toolbox.

In the case of pointfree style, there's a code golf aspect to it as well, it's kinda fun trying to rewrite a particular expression to eliminate variables and maximize the amount of non-alphanumeric characters!

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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by lexi-lambda on Thursday March 12, 2015 @04:26PM (#9193626)

Yeah, I'm quite willing to admit that point-free style seems to often be more harmful than helpful. The comments on r/haskell also pointed out ($) as an operator of possible over-use, which I think makes sense. I just don't want to abuse parentheses, since, coming from a Lisp background, that probably wouldn't be too difficult. :P

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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by cakoose on Friday March 13, 2015 @10:26PM (#9201319)

Ugh, that didn't go as planned.

1. Sorry to everyone about the "his". Like most people guessed, I explicitly tried not to use gender, but I slipped up.

2. I didn't mean to imply you were bad at programming. The only goal of my comment was "if you're thinking about learning Haskell, don't be scared off by point-free style". I thought that providing more background would help people understand the temptation, but I should have divorced it more from your decision to use point-free style.

(What's funny is that these were things I was aware of and tried to handle well, but still managed to screw up.)

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