
The IO monad is 45 years old - fogus
http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/nDNOvQyxznpcUYyrNRUw
======
jerf
I often feel bad for the computer scientists of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and to
some extent even the 80s. It is often complained that we've done nothing but
rehash the ideas of that era over and over, but that's because they were just
as smart as us, except they were stuck with _calculators_ instead of
_computers_. Perhaps even more focused since they lacked the distractions of
the internet and such. :) They had just as clear a shot at the ideas as we do,
except they lack the ability to just whip up a quick prototype in a execution
time/programming time tradeoff language like Python or Ruby and try it out in
a couple of hours, or run their new idea for a couple trillion cycles on their
personal laptop, or what ever. Their every implementation move was a laborious
task.

Oh, I'm sure my grandkids will be all like "How did you get work done with
mere gigabytes and gigahertz or those terrible, terrible early-2000
languages?" but at least we can do _something_. Some fields of comp sci are
still choked for computational power but at there are some now that aren't,
and even the ones that can soak up arbitrary amounts of processing power like
evolutionary computation still have some room for conventional improvement
first.

We are, slowly, getting over that era; look for any discipline that requires
too much power to be implemented at all back then and you can find it. Real-
time robotics, computer vision, massive databases and the searching thereof,
etc. But we'll still be in their shadow for a while longer.

------
spacemanaki
For anyone else who finds these third-party list archives kind of annoying:
[http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-
cafe/2010-December/...](http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-
cafe/2010-December/087788.html)

------
Kevembunagga
Why not look at the original:

[http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-
cafe@haskell.org/msg8572...](http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-
cafe@haskell.org/msg85720.html)

Yet, _beware_ , this is Oleg Kiselyov <http://okmij.org/ftp/> outstanding but
hard to grasp computation chores are child play for him. For instance the Y
combinator is "out" to much simpler U combinator
[http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/fixed-point-
combinators.htm...](http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/fixed-point-
combinators.html)

P.S. Amazing that Google picked up this link of _today_

