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 5. Patterns of Type Abstraction

In the previous chapter, we explored several ways in which the Haskell 98 language has been evolving via new libraries. This chapter brings to focus some key advances on another major front of Haskell's evolution: language extensions.

 

"Haskell's type system has developed extremely anarchically. Many of the new features were sketched, implemented, and applied well before they were formalized. This anarchy has both strengths and weaknesses. The strength is that the design space is explored much more quickly the weakness is that the end result is extremely complex, and programs are sometimes reduced to experiments to see what will and will not be acceptable to the compiler."

 
 --Hudak et al., History of Haskell

Haskell extensions are tied to the compiler implementation rather than the language standard (we use the GHC 7.1 0 compiler as our reference). We'll explore the extensions along three axes: abstracting functions, datatypes, and type-classes.

  • Abstracting...