Tag Archives: monad

2015/02/20
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Haskell actually does change the way you think

Last year I started trying to learn Haskell. There have been many ups and downs, but my only Haskell project so far is on hold while I work on other things. I’m not sure yet if I’d choose to use Haskell in production. The problems I had (and the time it’s taken so far) writing a simple server make me think twice, but that’s a story for another blog post.

The thing is, the whole reason I decided to learn Haskell were the many reports that it made me you think differently. As much as I like D, learning it was easy and essentially I’m using it as a better C++. There are things I routinely do in D that I wouldn’t have thought of or bother in C++ because they’re easier. But it’s not really changed my brain.

I didn’t think Haskell had either, until I started thinking of solutions to problems I was having in D in Haskell ways. I’m currently working on a build system, and since the configuration language is D, it has to be compiled. So I have interesting problems to solve with regards to what runs when: compile-time or run-time. Next thing I know I’m thinking of lazy evaluation, thunks, and the IO monad. Some things aren’t possible to be evaluated at compile-time in D. So I replaced a value with a function that when run (i.e. at run-time) would produce that value. And (modulo current CTFE limitations)… it works! I’m even thinking of making a wrapper type that composes nicely… (sound familiar?)

So, thanks Haskell. You made my head hurt more than anything I’ve tried learning since Physics, but apparently you’ve made me a better programmer.

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2015/01/17
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Haskell monads for C++ programmers

I’m not going to get into the monad tutorial fallacy. Also, I think this blog about another monad fallacy sums it up nicely: the problem isn’t understanding what monads are, but rather understanding how they can be used. Understanding the monad laws isn’t hard. Understanding how to use the Maybe monad isn’t hard either. But things get tricky pretty fast and there’ s a kind of monads that are similar to each other that took me a while to understand how to use. That is, until I recognised what they actually were: C++ template metaprogramming. I guess it’s the opposite realisation that Bartoz Milewski had.

The analogy is only valid for a few monads. The ones I’ve seen that this applies to are IO, State, and Get from Data.Binary. These are the monads that are referred to as computations, which sounds really abstract, but really functions that return these monads return mini-programs. These mini-programs don’t immediately do anything, they need to be executed first. In IO’s case that’s done by the runtime system, for State the runState does that for you (I’m stretching here – only IO really does anything, even runState is pure).

It’s similar to template metaprogramming in C++: at compile-time the programmer has access to a functional language with no side-effects that returns a function that at runtime (i.e. when executed) actually does something. After that realisation I got a lot better at understanding how and why to use them.

The monad issue doesn’t end there, unfortunately. There are many other monads that aren’t like C++ templates at all. But the ones that are – well, at least you’ll be able to recognise them now.

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