[Haskell-cafe] about Haskell code written to be "too smart"

[Manlio Perillo]

Tim Newsham ha scritto:
>> These friends are very interested in Haskell, but it seems that the 
>> main reason why they don't start to seriously learning it, is that 
>> when they start reading some code, they feel the "Perl syndrome".
>>
>> That is, code written to be "too smart", and that end up being totally 
>> illegible by Haskell novice.
>>
>> I too have this feeling, from time to time.
>>
>> Since someone is starting to write the Haskell coding style, I really 
>> suggest him to take this "problem" into strong consideration.
> 
> When you think about it, what you are saying is that Haskell programmers 
> shouldn't take advantage of the extra tools that Haskell provides. 

No, I'm not saying this.

But, as an example, when you read a function like:

buildPartitions xs ns = zipWith take ns . init $ scanl (flip drop) xs ns

that can be rewritten (argument reversed) as:

takeList :: [Int] -> [a] -> [[a]]
takeList [] _         =  []
takeList _ []         =  []
takeList (n : ns) xs  =  head : takeList ns tail
     where (head, tail) = splitAt n xs

I think that there is a problem.

The buildPartition contains too many "blocks".
And I have read code with even more "blocks" in one line.

It may not be a problem for a "seasoned" Haskell programmer, but when 
you write some code, you should never forget that your code will be read 
by programmers that can not be at your same level.

I think that many Haskell programmers forget this detail, and IMHO this 
is wrong.

> Haskell provides the ability to abstract code beyond what many other 
> programming systems allow.  This abstraction gives you the ability to 
> express things much more tersely.  This makes the code a lot harder to 
> read for people who are not familiar with the abstractions being used.  

The problem is that I have still problems at reading and understanding 
code that is too much terse...
Because I have to assemble in my mind each block, and if there are too 
many blocks I have problems.

 > [...]


Manlio