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)

Epilogue


Christopher Alexander, the father of design patterns in architecture, describes a pattern as a solution "you can use a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice". In our case, we've looked at high level design patterns to lower level idioms and everything in between.

This book has been the story of modern Haskell through the lens of patterns. We saw that Haskell is evolving along several fronts:

  • libraries that deal with specific domains for example Iteratee Streaming IO libraries, Foldable, Traversable, the Lens library

  • type system language extensions, for example, Rank-n types, existential and phantom types, GADTs, functional dependencies

  • Generic programming techniques: from template meta-programming to Origami datatype generic programming

  • the kind system language extensions: type functions, kind polymorphism, type promotion

As this evolution occurs, the real gems that are being forged are the underlying idioms and patterns, because they will ultimately outlast the...