[freyrs3]

> The way this problem manifests in Haskell is in how incredibly clever it makes you feel to get something done in it. Haskell is different enough from most languages that everything feels like an achievement when writing it. “Look, I used a monad! And defined my own type class for custom folding of data! Isn’t that amazing?“. “What does it do?” “It’s a CRUD app”.

The fallacy here is that type classes, folds and monads are not esoteric structures within the context of Haskell, and using them to structure regular business is pretty mundane. If someone feels a sense of achievement from doing this, they're probably very new to the language. The author of the article has baked in a value judgement about the "normal" way to structure a CRUD application that precludes alternative approaches to structuring application logic.

You could just as well argue that laying out object class hierarchies and using inheritance is "[solving problems] that have nothing to do with what you’re actually trying to achieve."

[DRMacIver]

> You could just as well argue that laying out object class hierarchies and using inheritance is "[solving problems] that have nothing to do with what you’re actually trying to achieve."

Could, indeed semi-regularly do. I actively dislike solving problems with inheritance.

I also actively dislike people missing the point. The problem is not "using programming to solve problems". The problem is letting the novelty of the programming you're using to solve problems con you into thinking you're doing something more clever than you actually are.

[iand675]

I think you're equally missing the point– for serious Haskell programmers, using a monad to structure computation for a CRUD app is nothing to write home about. Having personally written quite a lot of CRUD code with Haskell, I have never thought "Gee, I wrote this with a monad. I deserve a back pat."

If we're talking about things that make me smug as a Haskell developer, I'd probably say that I feel most accomplished when I figure out how to encode more invariants into the type system so that the compiler helps me make fewer errors. I still stand by Haskell as being the best language for that that's not just a university research language.

[skj]

> You could just as well argue that laying out object class hierarchies and using inheritance is "[solving problems] that have nothing to do with what you’re actually trying to achieve."

Definitely, 100%.

[jbooth]

A lot of people do argue that about big object-class hierarchies and inheritance, and they've been declining since the mid-2000s at least in mainstream OO languages like Java and C#.