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I'm getting started with functional programming, which language would you recommend? (gregtech.eu)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Specifically, I'm interested in BEAM, but I'm not sure if I should go for Elixir or Gleam. What seems cool about Gleam is that it has static typing.

I have no experience with functional programming at all btw

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[+] 21 points 1 year ago (7 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Haskell isn't the best venue for learning currying, monads, or other category-theoretic concepts because Hask is not a category. Additionally, the community carries lots of incorrect and harmful memes. OCaml is a better choice; its types don't yield a category, but ML-style modules certainly do!

    @thingsiplay@beehaw.org and @Kache@lemmy.zip are oversimplifying; a monad is a kind of algebra carried by some endofunctor. All endofunctors are chainable and have return values; what distinguishes a monad is a particular signature along with some algebraic laws that allow for refactoring inside of monad operations. Languages like Haskell don't have algebraic laws; for a Haskell-like example of such laws, check out 1lab's Cat.Diagram.Monad in Agda.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    When I read about Monads, it looks like to me like generic Rust struct with a generic trait and a (more complex) result as a return value. I have no idea if this is what a Monad basically is or not. For context, I never learned Haskell properly (just tried hello world and read a few topics).

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You should think of Monad as basically giving you a way to provide your own implementation of the semicolon operator so that you can dictate what it means to sequence computations of a given type.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I think the mistake I do (and many others) is trying to compare existing mechanisms from other languages, without the full picture around that mechanic. Every time I think to understand what a Monad is, its wrong. :D Guess I have to dive deeper to understand what that actually means, not just as an explanation. Just out of curiosity.

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