IO: You may say I'm a monad, but I'm not the only one! One of the things I love about Haskell is its tools for abstracting computation. There are so many different ways to look at a given problem, and new ones are being invented/discovered all the time. Monads are just one abstraction, a popular and important one. When you’re learning Haskell, you’re told ’IO is a monad’, and whether or not you understand what that means, you start to see the significance of binding impure values, returning pure ones, using do notation, and so on. I thought I was a pro at monads after discovering liftM, but I still hadn’t really made the jump to understanding monads in general, rather than as something specific to impure IO operations. Speaking of Applicative and Functor, I’ll also be introducing some of those other computation abstractions, and showing you the same code using several different styles. A quick review: functors A concept I’ll be referring to a lot in this post is the idea of computing on things in boxes. succ (Just 5) We can do this: Pow. Yup.
How would I even use a monad (in C#)? | Twisted Oak Studios Blog How would I even use a monad (in C#)? As you may have guessed, based on everyone ever trying to explain what they are, monads are an interesting concept. I assume the difficulty in explaining them stems from the high level of abstraction, compared to related ideas like “being enumerable”, but I won’t be trying to explain what a monad is in this post. If you do want an explanation of what a monad is, I recommend the marvels of monads, an old post that made the concept “click” for me. Querying your Monad Language integrated query (LINQ) was a major feature introduced way back in C#3. // before linqvar transformedList = new List();foreach (var item in inputList) { transformedList.Add(item * 2 + 1);}// after linqvar transformedSequence = from item in inputList select item * 2 + 1; You probably already know about query expressions, but you may not have known that you can query over more than just lists and other enumerables. Another common type of thing to make queryable is nullable values.
Haskell for all: Introductions to advanced Haskell topics Many people bemoan the sharp divide between experts and beginning Haskell programmers. One thing I've noticed is that "advanced" Haskell topics all have one thing in common: there exists only one good tutorial on that topic and only the experts have found it. This post is a collection of links to what I consider to be the definitive tutorials on these topics. Monads Monads are technically not an advanced Haskell topic, but I include this topic in the list because the vast majority of monad tutorials are terrible and/or misleading. Monad Transformers One thing that perpetually boggles me is that the blogosphere has almost no posts explaining how to use monad transformers. Parsing Outsiders comment that monads only exist to paper over Haskell's weaknesses until they discover monadic parsers. You also want to understand parser combinators for another reason: Haskell parser combinator libraries are light-years ahead of Haskell regular expression libraries. Free Monads Coroutines Lenses Conclusion
Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy” | blog :: Brent -> [String] While working on an article for the Monad.Reader, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how people learn and gain intuition for abstraction, and the implications for pedagogy. The heart of the matter is that people begin with the concrete, and move to the abstract. Humans are very good at pattern recognition, so this is a natural progression. By examining concrete objects in detail, one begins to notice similarities and patterns, until one comes to understand on a more abstract, intuitive level. This is why it’s such good pedagogical practice to demonstrate examples of concepts you are trying to teach. It’s particularly important to note that this process doesn’t change even when one is presented with the abstraction up front! Unfortunately, there is a whole cottage industry of monad tutorials that get this wrong.
The Lambda Calculus First published Wed Dec 12, 2012; substantive revision Fri Feb 8, 2013 The λ-calculus is, at heart, a simple notation for functions and application. The main ideas are applying a function to an argument and forming functions by abstraction. 1. The λ-calculus is an elegant notation for working with applications of functions to arguments. λx[x2 − 2·x + 5]. The λ operators allows us to abstract over x. The first step of this calculation, plugging in ‘2’ for occurrences of x in the expression ‘x2 − 2·x + 5’, is the passage from an abstraction term to another term by the operation of substitution. This example suggests the central principle of the λ-calculus, called β-reduction: (β) (λx[M])N ⊳ M[x := N] The understanding is that we can reduce or contract (⊳) an application (λxM)N of an abstraction term (the left-hand side, λxM) to something (the right-hand side, N) by simply plugging in N for the occurrences of x inside M (that's what the notation ‘M[x := N]’ expresses). 1.2 Intensionality 2.
Learn Haskell Fast and Hard I really believe all developers should learn Haskell. I don’t think everyone needs to be super Haskell ninjas, but they should at least discover what Haskell has to offer. Learning Haskell opens your mind. Mainstream languages share the same foundations: variablesloopspointersdata structures, objects and classes (for most) Haskell is very different. But learning Haskell can be hard. This article will certainly be hard to follow. The conventional method to learning Haskell is to read two books. In contrast, this article is a very brief and dense overview of all major aspects of Haskell. The article contains five parts: Introduction: a short example to show Haskell can be friendly.Basic Haskell: Haskell syntax, and some essential notions.Hard Difficulty Part: Functional style; a progressive example, from imperative to functional styleTypes; types and a standard binary tree exampleInfinite Structure; manipulate an infinite binary tree! 01_basic/10_Introduction/00_hello_world.lhs Introduction ou
concrete monads 1 : Maybe, Either, list, IO Writing a Raytracer in Common Lisp - Part 1 Haskell for all Monads, lifting, join, and side-effecting actions. While playing around with querying ElasticSearch I bumped into something that I hadn’t really understood explicitly before about monads, nesting, and IO. Rather than blather on, I’m going to share a “literate” ghci session that demonstrates the point. Main editing change I made was to remove duplication in the output from querying the type :t in ghci. import Network.HTTPimport Control.Monad (join, liftM) let url = " Importing the HTTP client library, a simple one based on IO. simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= liftM putStrLn . getResponseBody But that doesn’t print anything. λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url) :: IO (Network.Stream.Result (Network.HTTP.Response String)) λ> :t simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody :: IO String So we’ve got an IO action returning a String. For our purposes, fmap and liftM mean the same thing. λ> simpleHTTP (getRequest url) >>= getResponseBody >>= putStrLn {"took":11,"timed_out":false ...
Reusing Thunks for Recursive Data Structures in Lazy Functional Programs - Yasunao TAKANO LTMT Part 3: The Monad Cookbook Introduction The previous two posts in my Less Traveled Monad Tutorial series have not had much in the way of directly practical content. In other words, if you only read those posts and nothing else about monads, you probably wouldn't be able to use monads in real code. This was intentional because I felt that the practical stuff (like do notation) had adequate treatment in other resources. In this post I'm still not going to talk about the details of do notation--you should definitely read about that elsewhere--but I am going to talk about some of the most common things I have seen beginners struggle with and give you cookbook-style patterns that you can use to solve these issues. Problem: Getting at the pure value inside the monad This is perhaps the most common problem for Haskell newcomers. main = do lineList <- lines $ readFile "myfile.txt" -- ... do something with lineList here That code generates the following error from GHC: Both of these functions are defined in Prelude.