I’ve been getting back into Haskell lately because I’ve been using the XMonad window manager, which is written and configured in Haskell. Haskell has always held a special place in my heart; I taught myself Haskell by plowing through the ironically-named “Gentle Introduction to Haskell” several years ago, and it taught me more about clean side-effect free functional programming than any amount of Lisp.
A programming language must be considered in the context of its community, and Haskell has an exemplary one. #xmonad is without a doubt one of the friendliest and most helpful channels on IRC, without any of the elite condescension one usually finds on channels devoted to hardcore geek tools like Emacs. I have come to believe, however, that this polite exterior conceals a deep and consuming madness.
I refer to the Haskell community’s addiction to defining operators. Haskell permits virtually any string of nonword characters to be defined as a new operator. This in itself is not a problem, but Haskell programmers seem not to have absorbed the lesson that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
To make my point, I call upon Mark Twain, somewhat paraphrased:
In my note-book I find this entry:
July 1. — In the hospital yesterday, an operator of thirteen characters was successfully removed from a patient — a web developer from near Baltimore; but as most unfortunately the surgeons had opened him in the wrong place, under the impression that he contained a stack trace, he died. The sad event has cast a gloom over the whole community.
That paragraph furnishes a text for a few remarks about one of the most curious and notable features of my subject — the length and obscurity of Haskell operators. Some Haskell operators are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:
-->< &&>|||These things are not operators, they are symbolic processions. And they are not rare; one can open an xmonad.hs at any time and see them marching majestically across the screen — and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:
.|.< +>>>>^>>+++Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the LCD screen, it adorns and ennobles that coding landscape — but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it, or tunnel through it.
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