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


In this chapter, we explored the three primary kinds of "glues" that Haskell provides: functions, the type system, and lazy evaluation. We did so by focusing on composability of these building blocks and found that wherever we can compose, we are able to decompose, decouple, and modularize our code.

We also looked at the two main kinds of polymorphism (parametric and ad hoc) as they occur in Haskell.

This chapter set the scene for starting our study of design patterns for purely functional programming in Haskell.

The next chapter will focus on patterns for I/O. Working on I/O in the face of lazy evaluation is a minefield, and we would do well with some patterns to guide us.