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)

Scrap your boilerplate


Scrap your boilerplate (SYB) is another early approach to datatype-generic programming, that is, it provides a way to define generic functions over a "universal" type representation.

SYB differs from the other two approaches we have explored in that the type representation is obfuscated from the user.

Earlier versions of the SYB approach had a strong focus on generic traversals over complex nested data structures, for example:

data Book     = Book     Title [Chapter]
data Chapter   = Chapter Title [Section]
data Section   = Section Title [Para]
type Title     = String; type Para = String

haskellDP = Book "Haskell Design Patterns" chapters

chapters  = [Chapter "The building blocks" sections1, 
             Chapter "IO Patterns" sections2] 
 
sections1 = [Section "1.1" ["Lorem lorem"],  
             Section "1.2" ["Lorem lorem", "Lorem lorem"]] 
 
sections2 = [Section "2.1" ["Ipsum Ipsum"], 
             Section "2.2" ["Ipsum Ipsum", "Ipsum Ipsum"]] 

Suppose we have...