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)

Summary


This chapter explored some key language extensions and the design patterns associated with them. In particular, we looked at language extensions related to functions, datatypes, and type­classes and encountered two major costs of language extensions:

  • impaired type inference (requiring more type annotations)

  • affinity to compiler implementations (decreasing portability of code across compilers)

Language extensions make Haskell more powerful but also more complex, hence the sentiment:

 

"Whenever you add a new feature to a language, you should throw out an existing one (especially if the language at hand is named after a logician)"

 
 --Fun with Phantom Types, Hinze