A monoid is an interesting and underrated
"pattern" for objects where you can have a "nothing" and an operator that smashes two values together. The operator may be 'lossy' as in 3 + 4 = 7, or it might preserve the originals to some extent as in "3" + "4" = "34".
I realized the power of this when working with a new library and thinking "how do I concatenate these", all I had to do was check that the data was a Monoid and used mappend. There is something very satisfying about that.
Plus if you build some utilities on monoids, they'll work with lots of distinct objects, from parsers to numbers to lists to all sorts of other things.
What Haskell lacks in the community is people blogging about how to get more mundane things done like setting up a CRUD website, API, or desktop app. I have a site in my profile that attempts to fill that gap.
A monoid is an interesting and underrated "pattern" for objects where you can have a "nothing" and an operator that smashes two values together. The operator may be 'lossy' as in 3 + 4 = 7, or it might preserve the originals to some extent as in "3" + "4" = "34".
I realized the power of this when working with a new library and thinking "how do I concatenate these", all I had to do was check that the data was a Monoid and used mappend. There is something very satisfying about that.
Plus if you build some utilities on monoids, they'll work with lots of distinct objects, from parsers to numbers to lists to all sorts of other things.
What Haskell lacks in the community is people blogging about how to get more mundane things done like setting up a CRUD website, API, or desktop app. I have a site in my profile that attempts to fill that gap.