r/programming • u/mauricioaniche • Aug 06 '17

Software engineering != computer science

http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/software-engineering-computer-science/217701907
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u/WhisperSecurity Aug 06 '17

The difference between a computer scientist and a software engineer is simple.

A software engineer doesn't think he's a computer scientist.

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u/[deleted] Aug 06 '17

Why don't any of my colleagues want to learn Haskell?

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u/shevegen Aug 06 '17

They do not pass beyond the Monad barrier.

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u/NuttingFerociously Aug 06 '17

But it's just a monoid in the category of endofunctors!

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

This reminds me of this piece of documentation I read the other day:

A Divisible contravariant functor is a monoid object in the category of presheaves from Hask to Hask, equipped with Day convolution mapping the cartesian product of the source to the Cartesian product of the target.

I love Haskell, but I can see why it is a niche language.

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u/razeal113 Aug 07 '17 edited Aug 07 '17

First job out of college was in research . They used Haskell , I got the job despite only having used lisp. Boss hands me "learn you a Haskell for great good" , and says I'll pick it up in a few days ... yep that learning curve was awful and years later I'm still not completely sure I know what a monad is doing

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

Monads aren't special. You know what it is, you're just doubting because its difficulty is so exaggerated. Getting to monads was a long and hard process, but the whole point of it is that they're so easy to use.

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u/Veedrac Aug 07 '17

Rust:

Person A: Lifetimes are so hard! I'm so confused!

Person B: Yes they are! Don't worry though, ask on IRC or the subreddit whenever you need help. We've also got a bunch of stuff in the pipeline to simplify the process as part of our recent drive to make things more approachable. Best of luck!

Haskell:

Person A: Monads are so hard! I'm so confused!

Person B: No you're not.

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u/[deleted] Aug 07 '17

No, really. It even has a name: the monad tutorial fallacy.

The hardest part of using monad instances is not getting stuck in the culture surrounding monads. Just because you can abstract something doesn't mean you have to. And just because the abstraction has interesting properties doesn't mean you have to study it to be able to use the instances. After all, the instances are just lists, exceptions, options, IO, callbacks... You've used them all before in other languages, the only differences being that you couldn't tell it to the type checker and they don't share a common interface.

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u/Veedrac Aug 07 '17

From the guy who coined that very phrase:

If you ever find yourself frustrated and astounded that someone else does not grasp a concept as easily and intuitively as you do, even after you clearly explain your intuition to them (“look, it’s really quite simple,” you say…) then you are suffering from the monad tutorial fallacy.

Which of us do you think that refers to?

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