← Back to context

Comment by jiiam

14 days ago

Just to give a different pov I find Haskell very intuitive, and particularly I find that code written by other people is very easy to understand (compared to Java or TypeScript at least).

And by the way x and x' are totally fine names for a value of a very generic type (or even a very specific type depending on the circumstances), as long as the types and the functions are decently named. I mean, how else would you call the arguments of

splitAt :: Eq a => a -> [a] -> [[a]]

?

There is no need for anything more complex than

splitAt x xs = ...

4 comments

jiiam

Reply
whytevuhuni  13 days ago

> I mean, how else would you call the arguments of > splitAt :: Eq a => a -> [a] -> [[a]]

Those don't seem to be names of parameters, but rather of types. It's missing parameter names entirely.

I spent a good 2 minutes looking at that signature trying to figure it out (and I've read some Haskell tutorials so I'm at least familiar with the syntax). This would've helped:

    def split_by<T>(separator: T, list: List[T]) -> List[List[T]]

`sep`, `separator`, `delim`, `delimiter` would've been good names.

  • jiiam  13 days ago

    > Those don't seem to be names of parameters, but rather of types. It's missing parameter names entirely.

    The rest of the definition is at the end, to see it as a whole:

      splitAt :: Eq a => a -> [a] -> [[a]]

  splitAt x xs = ...

    To clarify, I assumed that by using the constraint `Eq a` and the name splitAt there was no need for extra clarification in the names of the parameters but apparently I was wrong.

    • gmfawcett  11 days ago

      I think some of the confusion is because you're referring to the type variables as parameters. Parameters and type variables are not the same thing. A is a type variable, X is a parameter in your example.