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Monday, July 14, 2014 at midnight.
pdxfunc: Portland Functional Programming Study Group
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Description
"Effects tracking shoot-out": Justin Bailey and Leif Warner will compare two different approaches for tracking effects in pure code proposed by Oleg Kiselyov and Edwin Brady, respectively. Justin will be presenting based off the approach described in Oleg's paper "Extensible Effects -- An Alternative to Monad Transformers" implemented in Haskell, while Leif will be presenting the DSL Edwin implemented in the Idris language.
"effects" are usually tracked in languages like Haskell with monads, and often combined with monad transformers. Both of these approaches aim for a more elegant alternative to monad transformers for this.
From the intro to Edwin's paper:
Monad transformers can quickly become unwieldy when there are lots of effects to manage, leading to a temptation in larger programs to combine everything into one coarse-grained state and exception monad.
And the intro to Oleg's paper:
We design and implement a library that solves the long-standing problem of combining effects without imposing restrictions on their interactions (such as static ordering). Effects arise from interactions between a client and an effect handler (interpreter); interactions may vary throughout the program and dynamically adapt to execution conditions. Existing code that relies on monad transformers may be used with our library with minor changes, gaining efficiency over long monad stacks. In addition, our library has greater expressiveness, allowing for practical idioms that are inefficient, cumbersome, or outright impossible with monad transformers. Our alternative to a monad transformer stack is a single monad, for the coroutine-like communication of a client with its handler. Its type reflects possible requests, i.e., possible effects of a computation. To support arbitrary effects and their combinations, requests are values of an extensible union type, which allows adding and, notably, subtracting summands. Extending and, upon handling, shrinking of the union of possible requests is reflected in its type, yielding a type-and-effect system for Haskell. The library is lightweight, generalizing the extensible exception handling to other effects and accurately tracking them in types.
ABOUT THE GROUP: Join programmers, researchers and enthusiasts to discuss functional programming. pdxfunc is a study/user group exploring the world of functional programming based in Portland, Oregon. The group welcomes programmers interested in all functional languages, including Haskell, OCaml, Erlang, Scala and others, as well as using functional techniques in non-functional languages. The group meets regularly and provides presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. The meetings are usually on the second Monday of the month.