Making Haskell hard to read, and information technology
Do idioms make code harder to read? Is information technology plug and play? Betteridge's law gives you the answer: no and no.
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Non-Obvious Haskell Idiom: Guard-Sequence
When working with Haskell we might encounter code that looks like, I don't know,
guard (input == "-") $> stdin
or something. This is the guard–sequence idiom. It returns Nothing if the condition is false, and the right-hand side if it is true. Better examples and more variations in the article.
One could argue this is the type of thing that makes Haskell hard to read – and that's true, for an outsider. But code should not be optimised for outsiders, it should be optimised for those that maintain the code, and the above certainly is easier to read for an experienced maintainer.
Full article (2–6 minute read): Non-Obvious Haskell Idiom: Guard-Sequence
Flashcard of the week
I don't remember from where this statement comes – I think it is the study of expertise – but I think it also illustrates one of the reasons software development is difficult.
What does information technology do to the task it is intended to support?
You might be able to guess the answer if I whisper "changing requirements".
Information technology often transforms the nature of the task it is intended to support.
One of the reasons software requirements change is simply that the task for which it was originally built became different once the software was delivered.
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