spookylukey

They say that you don’t understand something until you can explain it. So I wrote an article about understanding monads via Python list comprehensions . I submitted it to http://programming.reddit.com, and got some very nice feedback, so I was pretty pleased.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading and experimenting with ghci/hugs/emacs, and I have to say from what I’ve read and tried so far, Haskell is easily the most beautiful and aesthetically pleasing language I’ve tried—it really is very elegant, both in terms of concepts and how it looks on the page (though in both ways it is quite alien if you only know Algol family languages).

Haskell is like executable maths, with all the power that brings, but with plenty of sugar and constructs for doing programming. As maths, it also gets to benefit from the research done by clever mathematicians across the world, in ways that simply would never apply to other languages, which are really dressed-up assembly code in comparison.

What I need now is a real programming task that I need Haskell for.

I found recently (very recently, to my shame as someone who has been a Christian 15 years), that I can pray so much better outdoors, if I find a quiet area on my own. Thankfully that is pretty easy for me—the local cemetery is always deserted first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and beautiful too.

I think sometimes we take Matthew 6:6 too literally—after all we always read about Jesus going outdoors alone to pray. I personally find it much easier to spend some un-rushed time with God when I leave the house and go for a walk alone.