whenJust / forM_ (was Re: Proposal: Add isLeft/isRight to Data.Either)

[Conrad Parker]

On 8 December 2012 02:38, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, December 7, 2012, Thomas Schilling wrote:
>>
>> On 7 December 2012 09:25, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > There is no need to define whenJust, since it is just a specialization
>> > of forM_ from Data.Foldable.
>>
>> I don't know if that's such a good argument.  I prefer my code
>> readable -- too much abstraction can have a seriously bad effect on
>> that.  As a simple rule, if the user has to do type inference in their
>> head, readability suffers.
>>
>> In this case, "forM_" implies we're iterating over something container
>> like, "whenJust" means "I want to do something if this thing yielded a
>> result". It depends on the context whether a "Maybe" is behaving more
>> container-like or is indicating the presence of a result where there
>> may not have been one.
>
>
> I don't have this problem, but I guess that's just personal. But in general
> I'm not in favor of adding specialized versions of generalized functions.

indeed, and likewise we should get rid of

Control.Monad.forM_ :: Monad m => [a] -> (a -> m b) -> m ()

which is just the same specialization to lists (and likely the reason
that forM_ doesn't come to mind for other container types, as much as
I generally like Data.Foldable).

btw:

$ git grep whenJust|wc -l
40

Conrad.