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)

Modernizing Haskell 98


The introduction of Applicative, along with Foldable and Traversable, have had a big impact on Haskell.

The Foldable and Traversable type­classes lift the Prelude fold and map functions to a much higher level of abstraction. Moreover, Foldable and Traversable also bring a clean separation between processes that preserve or discard the shape of the structure being processed:

  • Traversable describes a process that preserves the shape of the data structure being traversed over

  • Foldable discards (or transforms) the shape of the structure being folded over

Since Traversable is a specialization of Foldable, we can say that shape preservation is a special case of shape transformation. This line between shape preservation and transformation is clearly visible from the fact that functions that discard their result (for example, mapM_, forM_, sequence_, and so on) are in Foldable, while their shape-preserving counterparts are in Traversable.

Due to the relatively late introduction...