On: Revisiting 'Monadic Parsing in Haskell'

[dmix]

> This was the first application of monads I encountered that actually made my life simpler, and I started to realise that there was more to monads than smugness and being inaccessible to newcomers.

I had the same experience, Parsec is one of the best examples of the power of Haskell and what really sold me on the language.

It's also a great way to communicate the utility and effectiveness for using monads to solve programming problems (in this case as an alternative to messy Regex).

I'm really looking forward to Purescript [1], which has its own Parsec library in development [2] so I can use it with my frontend development... which is typically where I used Regex the most (in the DOM).

[1] http://www.purescript.org/

[2] https://github.com/purescript-contrib/purescript-parsing

[rspeer → dmix]

I've had a similar experience, where I'm not even a fan of the Haskell ecosystem overall, but Attoparsec is such an astoundingly good library that it makes everything worth it. It's not just a convenience like other libraries would be -- in fact, it comes with the built-in inconvenience of using a language I don't normally use. But it actually gives me the ability to solve problems I would not solve without it. Parsing is the killer app for Haskell.

So far I haven't been satisfied with any Parsec port to another language. This article helped me understand how a lot of the design of [Atto]parsec is just the natural result of using Haskell for what it's good for, and that aspect seems to translate badly when Haskell is replaced with another language. But maybe the Purescript port can do better.