monad tutorial, slow darcs

monads tutorial

Fixed one of the flaws in my monads as spacesuits tutorial (well, nuclear waste containers rather) on wikibooks. It was in my definition of the get and put functions where I was accepting an argument too many (and then discarding it). The tricky bit was that using the correct definition of get/put involved introducing the anonymous bind >> operator to the reader. I hope I did it right... I think it's probably clearer anyway that I went ahead and did this... it makes the bit where I explain IO a tiny bit less shaky.

Though this is a wiki, I seem to be in the habit of (1) profusely thanking people who modify the tutorial (2) reverting their change with a plea to read my comments on the discussion page. It's happened three times, already, one with ihope127's replacement of € with |> (which was a reasonable thing for him to do, since € wasn't Haskell, but € is useful because you can think of it as $, but backwards), another time with the get/put thing and a third with the use of the modify function. I really really DO want to collaborate, though (hence the profuse thanks), it's just that I keep disagreeing with what people do to it. I'm not a control freak, really. I hope I'm not, anyway. I mean, I do try to solicit the other party's opinion on matters and try to integrate what s/he thinks into the writing. Hope I'm not turning anybody off from the project.

slow darcs hacking

My darcs development is going soooo slowly. Part of it is because I'm working on it like 15 minutes a day, instead of a few hours, and 15 minutes isn't enough to get you into that state of intense concentration where everything just flows out of your fingers. I'll need to allocate a somewhat larger chunk of weekend to darcs, just so I can keep any promises I made. The other part is that it's kinda boring writing test suites, and I've got a little bit of that to be doing. Need to get a test suite for matching, and one for mv/rmdir testing out the issue154 fix. But I am workin' on it, making little bits of progress here and there.

That's the way it'll have to be I guess... it has occured to me that the only way I'm going to finish my thesis in the allotted 3 years is by working really fricking hard (I've got slightly under 1.5 years to go), so bye-bye hobbies. Oh well, it's been fun and very educational, not that this is goodbye darcsers or anything.