We Call That 'Schönfinkelling' Where I Come From

10 March 2013

A friend and I were discussing this blog post by Joe Duffy, about type classes and C#. It's deep enough that it took a second reading to really gel, but we'd discussed in person after the first time, in which I'd mostly skimmed the samples, and just read the commentary. Obviously, this is not verbatim (nor did I spell out the symbols):

Me:

I've been meaning to read 'Learn You a Haskell for Great Good' for a while now, but I know literally zero Haskell. Function signature syntax like "isin :: Eq a => a -> [a] -> Bool" just seems unnecessarily...Perlish in its use of symbols.

Him:

Yeah, all function type defs in Haskell are in the form of, err...you know, when a function taking multiple arguments is represented as successive single-argument functions?

Me:

Ah, right; currying. That makes so much more sense, in retrospect.

At the time, I shrugged off its forced use in Haskell, chalking it up to intentional esotericism. Some 15 hours later I was in the shower, having a Doc Brown moment. Hey! That is the actual man's friggin' last name.

Also, about the title.