Software Simply

IntroductionThe previous twoposts 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 monadThis is perhaps the most common problem for Haskell newcomers. It usually manifests itself as something like this: main = do lineList <- lines $ readFile "myfile.txt" -- ... do something with lineList here That code generates …

In part 1 of this tutorial we talked about types and kinds. Knowledge of kinds will help to orient yourself in today's discussion of monads. What is a monad? When you type "monad" into Hayoo the first result takes you to the documentation for the type class Monad. If you don't already have a basic familiarity with type classes, you can think of a type class as roughly equivalent to a Java interface. A type class defines a set of functions involving a certain data type. When a data type defines all the functions required by the type class, we say that it is an instance of that type class. When a type Foo is an instance of the Monad type class, you'll commonly hear people say "Foo is a monad". Here is a version of the Monad type class.class Monad m where return :: a -> m a (=<<) :: (a -> m b) -> m a -> m b(Note: If you're the untrusting type and looked up the real definition to verify that mine is accurate, you'll find th…

This is part 1 of a monad tutorial (but as we will see, it's more than your average monad tutorial). If you already have a strong grasp of types, kinds, monads, and monad transformers, and type signatures like newtype RST r s m a = RST { runRST :: r -> s -> m (a, s) } don't make your eyes glaze over, then reading this won't change your life. If you don't, then maybe it will.More seriously, when I was learning Haskell I got the impression that some topics were "more advanced" and should wait until later. Now, a few years in, I feel that understanding some of these topics earlier would have significantly sped up the learning process for me. If there are other people out there whose brains work somewhat like mine, then maybe they will be able to benefit from this tutorial. I can't say that everything I say here will be new, but I haven't seen these concepts organized in this way before.This tutorial is not for absolute beginners. It assumes a basic…