Not at all. You can start doing I/O in Haskell without knowing anything at all a... | Hacker News

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		shangaslammi on Nov 3, 2012 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Learn a Programming Language Faster by Copying Uni... Not at all. You can start doing I/O in Haskell without knowing anything at all about monads by just treating the do-syntax as an imperative DSL. In fact, Bryan O'Sullivan (who wrote Real World Haskell) just held a tutorial session on Haskell a couple of weeks ago where people completely new to the language implemented simple Unix tools like "wc". I don't think monads were mentioned at all.

4ad on Nov 3, 2012 [–]

This only works if you are a top-down thinker. Many people are bottom-up thinkers.

anothermachine on Nov 4, 2012 | [–]

Explain?

With "do" and the coincidental naming of "return", and IORefs if you insist, you can write imperative bottom-up code in Haskell.

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