this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
1022 points (98.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

23861 readers
2989 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Feyter@programming.dev
anzo@programming.dev
BurningTurtle@programming.dev
pylapp@programming.dev
1022
JavaScript (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 days ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
159 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bss03@infosec.pub 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

This is my favorite language: GHC Haskell

GHC Haskell:

GHCi> length (2, "foo")
1
[–] yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Wait, now I need to know why.

* some time later *

I went to check why the hell this happened. It looks like the pair ("(,)") is defined as an instance of Foldable, for some reason, which is the class used by functions like foldl() and foldr(). Meanwhile, triples and other tuples of higher order (such as triples, quadruples, ...) are not instances of Foldable.

The weirdest part is that, if you try to use a pair as a Foldable, you only get the second value, for some reason... Here is an example.

ghci> foldl (\acc x -> x:acc) [] (1,2)

[2]

This makes it so that the returned length is 1.

[–] bss03@infosec.pub 6 points 2 days ago

Oddly enough, in Haskell (as defined by the report), length is monomorphic, so it just doesn't work on tuples (type error).

Due to the way kinds (types of types) work in Haskell, Foldable instances can only operate over (i.e. length only counts) elements of the last/final type argument. So, for (,) it only counts the second part, which is always there exactly once. If you provided a Foldable for (,,,) it would also have length of 1.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I don't even know Haskell but it seems like (" ( , ) ") would be an instance of boob.

[–] bss03@infosec.pub 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

(.) is a valid expression in Haskell. Normally it is the prefix form of the infix operator . that does function composition. (.) (2*) (1+) 3 = ((2*) . (1+)) 3 = 2 * (1 + 3) = 8.

But, the most common use of the word "boob" in my experience in Haskell is the "boobs operator": (.)(.). It's usage in Haskell is limited (tho valid), but it's appearance in racy ASCII art predates even the first versions on Haskell.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

The pioneers of ASCII art in the 70s and 80s are the unsung heroes of porn.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It looks like two worms split running from another tinier worm. Makes you wonder what it has done to be so feared