BayHac2014 Posted on May 19, 2014

I’m making my way back from BayHac 2014 as I write this but I wanted to put down a few thoughts while they’re still fresh.

Friday

The hackathon started out with a talk on Pipes by Gabriel Gonzalez and then one on Free Monads by Dan Piponi. Both were excellent. And excellent here means that I think they were both the most lucid explanations of their respective topic that I’ve yet seen.

Gabriel’s talk really helped to solidify my understanding of where pipes sit relative to conduit, the other streaming-data library that I’m familiar with. The emphasis in the pipes talk was on the intuition behind the ListT type and the yield and await functions.

Dan Piponi spoke on free monads, Free, but not as in beer or speech (video), by first starting with an algebraic structure called a magma, which is simply a single, closed binary operation on a set:

Next he suggested the idea of the “least special magma.” We want to capture the idea that we can do this binary operation, and that we have things that are part of the set (the a above). This leads us to a tree:

So the idea is that we’re combining two subexpressions (which could be just Var a , of course) and that’s it. The structure embodies the operation that we’re interested in. I don’t want to recapitulate the talk, but here’s one last slide. We can kinda crawl the structure that we’ve set up in order to evaluate the free magma:

Evaluating this thing is really just replacing the structure with elements of our choosing according to some rule.

The talk goes on (and the plot thickens!) by moving into free monoids and then, free monads. It was a great introduction!

Saturday

Saturday I was able to attend part of the Yesod class (and I’m already a little familiar with Yesod), so the introduction was mostly things I’ve covered on my own. As an aside, I was scheduled for the Lens class and I say scheduled because BayHac was very popular and classes were randomly assigned based up on interest and space. Most classes were packed.

The lens introduction by Shachaf Ben-Kiki was great. I’ve been reading up on these a lot lately so for me the ground had been prepared in just the right way for me to get a lot out of this. Shachaf moved at a brisk pace, whether through practice or sheer type-signature-fu, he hammered out types and definitions for things like lenses and traversals about as fast as I type prose. This class really lit a bulb for me about why the types work the way that they do for lenses. My very hand-wavey summary of this was that a lens is like having a writer monad “logging” the parts of some structure you’re interested in walking over. But rather than being interested in the value that the writer produces it’s the log that you want.

Caution, the following is based on my own emerging understanding of Lenses. Please pardon any errors (and I welcome corrections).

What started to make sense for me was the connection between over, traverse, and Lens.

First, looking at traverse, which has the type:

you can think of it as a sort of generalized map (I do). We know the f above is a Functor because:

So, picking an Applicative, say the Identity Applicative, you can write something like map:

notice how we’re sort of “packaging” up the result of the function in a dummy Applicative ( runIdentity . Identity == id ), which we then immediately discard. This is exactly the sort of sleight of hand that we need for Lens:

Notice how the view function does something really similar:

Const is similar to Identity in that it has a “weird” definition:

` haskell instance Functor (Const m) where fmap _ (Const v) = Const v -- the function doesn't matter!

putting that all together (and I’m still a bit fuzzy on how the types work out on these) gives you something that takes a Lens of some structure but then ignores that structure (the s in the Const a s ). So you’re getting your structure with the value picked out, but then ignoring the structure (and leaving just the value you’re interested in).

That’s really handwavey, but here’s an example:

Now I can make a Lens of fn by specifying my own getter and setter functions:

Now I can use that to access the Person structure:

And the type would be something like:

view :: (a -> Const a a) -- as above -> s -> Const a s -> m a fnLens :: (String -> Const String String) -- subbing in types -> Person -> Const String Person view fnLens :: MonadReader Person m => m String

The above type signature is a bit wonky, but I think it captures what’s happening as the types unify. So it all boils down to something that extracts a String from a Person . But the intuition that is starting to grow for me is that Lenses let you use a carefully-chosen (i.e. Const ) Functor to “smuggle” a value out of a bigger structure.

Sunday

I spent a lot of time on Sunday working on Joe Nelson’s haskell-vim-now one-line Haskell Vim installer. Lots of people were excited about the prospect of having an easy-to-install Vim mode. I think that this has made a lot of progress. If you like Vim and want to do Haskell development, go install it now. If you want to just install it here, just run this:

But please see the README for keybindings and general tips on use. Also, if there is anything that you’d like to see included or revised, you are invited to submit an issue.

I also spent some time talking with the Snowdrift.coop developers. This is a funding platform that seeks to crowdfund ongoing Free/Libre/Open Source projects. They have a nice intro. The Haskell angle here is that this is a Yesod app: source on Github and on Gitorious.

Summary

BayHac was a great experince! I got to meet with a bunch of people that I had only been following online so far. And I think it really fired me up to write more production Haskell. I’m even looking for ways to integrate it into Bendyworks’ development.