[Haskell-cafe] What I wish someone had told me...

Alexey Romanov alexey.v.romanov at gmail.com
Tue Oct 14 08:51:57 EDT 2008


Well, they act like interfaces in argument types, just not variable or
return types.

Yours, Alexey Romanov



On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 4:11 PM, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was just thinking about what I wish someone had told me when I
> started working with Haskell (not that long ago).  It would have saved
> me a great deal of trouble.
>
> The Difference Between Interfaces and Type Classes.
>
> Many "Introduction to Haskell for the OOper" style tutorials claim
> that type classes are like Interfaces (for languages with that
> feature).  I now think that, although this is technically true, it's
> fundamentally misleading.  Here's a simple example demonstrating my
> line of thought:
>
> In C# (and presumably Java), this sort of function is common:
> public IList GetListOfData()
>
> In Haskell, a similar function may be
> GetListOfData :: (Foldable a, Indexable a) => IO a
>
> In C#, it doesn't matter what the actual type returned by
> GetListOfData is, as long is it supports the IList interface.  It's
> not uncommon for GetListOfData to make a choice between several
> different implementations, depending on the nature of the data to be
> returned.  The following code is perfectly reasonable in C# :
>
> // List and MyList are different classes
> if (something) { return new List(); }
> else { return new MyList(); }
>
> The equivalent won't compile in Haskell, because the actual return
> type does matter, and *is determined by the calling code*.  Our
> fictional GetListOfData can't return a List or a Mylist depending on
> some conditional, in fact it can't explicitly return either one at
> all, because the actual type of the result, as determined by the
> caller, could be either one, or something else entirely (ignoring the
> IO bit for the time being).
>
> So I've come to the conclusion that stating type classes are like
> interfaces is misleading to newcomers to Haskell, because it leads
> people to think they should use type classes for the same sorts of
> problems OO-languages solve with interfaces.  In turn this means new
> programmers are encouraged to use OO-style architecture in programs,
> reassured that they're in a "functional" idiom because they're using
> the "functionally-approved" feature of type classes.  I think that if
> I had understood this earlier, I would have embraced functional idioms
> more quickly.
>
> Incidentally, I'm still horrible at designing functional APIs and
> modules, but at least now I know it, and I'm no longer trying to force
> OO interfaces into Haskell.  So I've made progress.
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