Re: [Caml-list] Re: variance, subtyping and monads... oh, my!

[james woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>]

On Monday, November 19, 2001, at 12:11 , Francois Pottier wrote:
> James Woodyatt wrote:
>> Now, is it my imagination, or is all that research into what you can
>> build out of monads primarily a way for Haskell people to rediscover
>> everything we already know about polymorphism, inheritance and
>> encapsulation?
>
> Isn't that a bit harsh?

Maybe.  I'm more of a developer than a researcher.  As with any 
research, it's not useful to me until I know how and why to apply it.

If it *isn't* just my imagination, and it turns out that monadic 
programming is only a way to apply object-oriented programming 
techniques in purely functional languages, then I'd have to ask, "What's 
the point?"  We've already discovered object-oriented programming, as 
well as how to integrate it with a functional language, i.e. Objective 
Caml.

If by using monads, on the other hand, I can do something easily that 
would otherwise be very awkward, then I'm sold.  So far, I have only 
found examples of how to do things I can already do better with the 
imperative and object-oriented styles in OCaml.

Last month's Communications of the ACM (or was it the month before?) had 
a special on "aspect-oriented programming," which intrigued me.  Is 
there, perhaps, a natural application of monadic programming there?


--
j h woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>
"somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly
pathetic that it has to be us." --jerry garcia

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