blog :: IO Life → [String] | living with side effects

This morning, I decided to change the name of my blog. In the last few years, it was called str(fpletz.life). This was a reference to the Python programming language. The statement roughly translates to: give me the string representation of the attribute life of the object fpletz.

Having programmed only a few lines of Python in the last few months, it was time for a change. These days, I’m amazed by the functional programming language Haskell, so the new name of my blog is blog :: IO Life → [String]. This statement is the type declaration of a function called blog that expects one monadic I/O parameter with a payload of the type Life and returns a list of strings. So this function is in fact representing my blog, which takes the current state of my life and the world I’m living in and returns blog posts.

However, such a definition is of course not possible. You can’t extract a value out of a monad or transform it. By having acquired the state, you have caused side effects. But that’s why a human is writing this blog and not the haskell compiler. I can deal with the side effects and can choose to ignore them. ;)