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 6. Patterns of Generic Programming

In this chapter, we seek a unified view of "Generic Programming", which comes in many guises; hence the statement,

 

"Genericity is in the eye of the beholder"

 
 --Jeremy Gibbons, Datatype-Generic Programming

We start with a broad perspective by reviewing Jeremy Gibbons' patterns of generic programming—many of which we have already encountered. Then we shift focus to one of the patterns—datatype-generic programming—which is characterized by generic functions parameterized by the shape of the datatype instead of the content.

To get a taste of datatype-generic programming, we'll sample three basic approaches: the sum of products, origami programming, and scrap your boilerplate.

Along the way, we'll encounter a few exotic Haskell types (Typeable and Data; Bifunctor and Fix), reveal the underpinnings of Derivable type classes and also discover four Gang of Four design patterns in the heart of datatype-generic programming:

  • Patterns of generic programming

  • Sum...