Guessing game: Haskell style

13 points by kqr

Sanity

What a nice Haskell tutorial :-)

I kind of like using do-notation for Maybe as well as IO, but I’m not sure whether it’s more newbie-friendly or less newbie-friendly to do things like

mkSmallInteger i = do
   guard (i>=1 && i<=100)
   pure (SmallInteger i)

readSmallInteger input = do
   i <- readMaybe input
   mkSmallInteger i

vs having to learn $> and >>=

I’m also trying to wean myself off <$> – it’s not that much harder to fmap (foo . bar) (get thing) but I think it may be less off-putting to outsiders.

polywolf

This has always been my sticking point when trying to learn Haskell; many many unfamiliar idioms. Just reading the types of the operators doesn’t help b/c haven’t internalized the difference between Functor/Appllicative just starting out.

To the author’s credit https://entropicthoughts.com/non-obvious-haskell-idiom-guard-sequence (linked in article) is very helpful for understanding what $> is used to do at least.
- kqr
  
  This has always been my sticking point when trying to learn Haskell; many many unfamiliar idioms. Just reading the types of the operators doesn’t help b/c haven’t internalized the difference between Functor/Appllicative just starting out.
  
  If you come across more of these, please let me know! I’d be more than happy to write more “non-obvious idioms” articles, but since I have some experience I don’t always recognise which they are. (I do have two more of these articles queued up, but I’m sure there are 25 more idioms to be covered.)
danso

I personally prefer <&> over <$> most of the time. In my experience, anglophone Haskell beginners appreciate when the code feels left-to-right.

lucabtz

Very interesting post. I’m trying to learn Haskell in my free time and this was very useful.

The purity of the language for me is the main perk. I think it makes it so interesting and fascinating