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)

Type-level programming


Type families bring functions to the type-level. Polymorphic kinds bring polymorphism to the kind-level. Type promotion bring datatypes and type-safety to the kind-level.

Two major problems of the Haskell kind system are solved by these extensions:

  • The kind system is too restrictive (because it lacks polymorphism)

    • Solution: Provide polymorphism on the kind level (PolyKinds)

  • The kind system is too permissive (kinds are too vague)

    • Solution: Promote datatypes to kinds to simulate a type-system on the kind-level (DataKinds)

Haskell98 already carried the seed for type-level programming by including multiparameter type-classes. Since then, the Haskell kind-system has been enriched with functional dependencies, GADTs, type families, kind polymorphism, and type-promotion.

Together, these extensions provide the building blocks for type-level programming in Haskell.

Returning to our earlier example, let's write a type-level function that computes type-level numbers. Since we have...