Programmer Humor

Having a Result[T, Err] monad that could represent either the data from a successful operation or an error. This can be generalised to the Either[A, B] monad too.

Someone else and not an expert. But Maybe types are implemented with Monads, Maybe is a common monad.

Its how rust does error handling for example, you have to test a return value for "something or nothing" but you can pass the monadic value and handle the error later, in go you have to handle the error explicitly (almost) all the time.

Here's an example (first in Haskell then in Go), lets say you have some types/functions:

• type Possible a = Either String a
• data User = User { name :: String, age :: Int }
• validateName :: String -> Possible String
• validateAge :: Int -> Possible Int

then you can make

mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
mkValidUser name age = do
  validatedName ← validateName name
  validatedAge  ← validateAge age
  pure $ User validatedName validatedAge

for some reason <- in lemmy shows up as <- inside code blocks, so I used the left arrow unicode in the above instead

in Go you'd have these

• (no Possible type alias, Go can't do generic type aliases yet, there's an open issue for it)
• type User struct { Name string; Age int }
• func validateName(name string) (string, error)
• func validateAge(age int) (int, error)

and with them you'd make:

func mkValidUser(name string, age int) (*User, error) {
  validatedName, err = validateName(name)
  if err != nil {
    return nil, err
  }

  validatedAge, err = validateAge(age)
  if err != nil {
    return nil, err
  }

  return User(Name: validatedName, Age: validatedAge), nil
}

In the Haskell, the fact that Either is a monad is saving you from a lot of boilerplate. You don't have to explicitly handle the Left/error case, if any of the Eithers end up being a Left value then it'll correctly "short-circuit" and the function will evaluate to that Left value.

Without using the fact that it's a functor/monad (e.g you have no access to fmap/>>=/do syntax), you'd end up with code that has a similar amount of boilerplate to the Go code (notice we have to handle each Left case now):

mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
mkValidUser name age =
  case (validatedName name, validateAge age) of
    (Left nameErr, _) => Left nameErr
    (_, Left ageErr)  => Left ageErr
    (Right validatedName, Right validatedAge) => 
      Right $ User validatedName validatedAge

Note: Lemmy code blocks don't play nice with some symbols, specifically < and & in the following code examples

This isn't a language level issue really though, Haskell can be equally ergonomic.

The weird thing about ?. is that it's actually overloaded, it can mean:

• call a function on A? that returns B?
• call a function on A? that returns B

you'd end up with B? in either case

Say you have these functions

toInt :: String -> Maybe Int

double :: Int -> Int

isValid :: Int -> Maybe Int

and you want to construct the following using these 3 functions

fn :: Maybe String -> Maybe Int

in a Rust-type syntax, you'd call

str?.toInt()?.double()?.isValid()

in Haskell you'd have two different operators here

str >>= toInt <&> double >>= isValid

however you can define this type class

class Chainable f a b fb where
    (?.) :: f a -> (a -> fb) -> f b

instance Functor f => Chainable f a b b where
    (?.) = (<&>)

instance Monad m => Chainable m a b (m b) where
    (?.) = (>>=)

and then get roughly the same syntax as rust without introducing a new language feature

str ?. toInt ?. double ?. isValid

though this is more general than just Maybes (it works with any functor/monad), and maybe you wouldn't want it to be. In that case you'd do this

class Chainable a b fb where
    (?.) :: Maybe a -> (a -> fb) -> Maybe b

instance Chainable a b b where
    (?.) = (<&>)

instance Chainable a b (Maybe b) where
    (?.) = (>>=)

restricting it to only maybes could also theoretically help type inference.

It's not a half-arsed copy, it's borrowing a limited subset of HKT for a language with very different goals. Haskell can afford a lot of luxuries that Rust can't.

You can say it's half-arsed if you like, but it's still vastly more convenient to write than if err != nil all over the place

I actually kind of like the error handling. Code should explain why something was a problem, not just where it was a problem. You get a huge string of "couldn't foobar the baz: target baz was not greebleable: no greeble provider named fizzbuzz", and while the strings are long as hell they are much better explanations for a problem than a stack trace is.

Hahaha, fuck no, I've dealt with exception-less code enough in my life, kthxbye