Data.List.join

Bulat Ziganshin bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com
Sun Oct 22 13:09:27 EDT 2006


Hello Jon,

Sunday, October 22, 2006, 7:16:28 PM, you wrote:

>> > intercalate, surely?
>> it's a rare word that is unknown for english-guests like me

> В противоположность "Monad" например?

> (Apologies for what is probably appalling grammar!)

it's correct :)  and you found a great example - this word from math
language is sense-less for peoples whose native language is not Math
and makes all sorts of confusion. naming it Combinator or Strategy or
smth like this will cut learning curve


> More
> seriously, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if
> giving names to things that have such a short expression as
> “((concat .) . intersperse)” might not be counterproductive.

> Whatever we call it, even if it's a word in an English
> dictionary, it's meaning in Haskell becomes an additional
> learning burden on a programmer who whishes to understand
> programmes that use it. “(concat.).intersperse” might cause
> some head scratching at first, but everything involved is
> something that the programmer will have to learn anyway, and
> if its use is frequent, it will become idiomatic.

once you've learned smth, it looks really easy and you may wonder why
other stupid peoples can't understand this immediately. but recall how
much time of Haskell learning was required for you to make itself
familiar with such idioms?

from viewpoint of readability for as much people as possible i prefer
join or joinWith. join used in ruby and, i think, in perl. joinWith is
at least readable. all other ways, imho, leads to building "secret
language" which foreigners will need to learn without getting any advantages



-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com



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