Book Image

Haskell Design Patterns

By : Tikhon Jelvis, Ryan Lemmer
Book Image

Haskell Design Patterns

By: Tikhon Jelvis, Ryan Lemmer

Overview of this book

Design patterns and idioms can widen our perspective by showing us where to look, what to look at, and ultimately how to see what we are looking at. At their best, patterns are a shorthand method of communicating better ways to code (writing less, more maintainable, and more efficient code) This book starts with Haskell 98 and through the lens of patterns and idioms investigates the key advances and programming styles that together make "modern Haskell". Your journey begins with the three pillars of Haskell. Then you'll experience the problem with Lazy I/O, together with a solution. You'll also trace the hierarchy formed by Functor, Applicative, Arrow, and Monad. Next you'll explore how Fold and Map are generalized by Foldable and Traversable, which in turn is unified in a broader context by functional Lenses. You'll delve more deeply into the Type system, which will prepare you for an overview of Generic programming. In conclusion you go to the edge of Haskell by investigating the Kind system and how this relates to Dependently-typed programming
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 3. Patterns of Composition

Function composition is a fundamental part of functional programming. This chapter is concerned with exploring the composition characteristics of the fundamental type-classes: Functor, Applicative Functor, Arrow, and Monad. We will see that Functor embeds into Applicative Functor, which embeds into Arrow, which embeds into Monad. After exploring Monad composition, we'll also look into Monad transformers (a technique for composing different types of Monad). As we move through the successive types, from the most general (Functor) to the most powerful (Monad), we will see how they differ in the ways they can be composed.

Note that this chapter does not have the last word on composition patterns, for example, in the following chapter we will explore another pattern for composition: functional lenses.

  • Functor

  • Applicative functor

  • Monad

  • Monad transformers

  • Arrow