Talk: 10:15-11:00 (English)
Applicative DSLs
Monadic DSLs are ubiquitous in functional programming: Parser combinators, build systems, test data generators (like QuickCheck’s Gen) are usually monadic, and »Free Monad + Interpreter« is a well-known pattern for building DSLs. Monads allow a great deal of flexibility for DSL embedding, and come with a rich interface of generic combinators. In comparison, Applicatives seem quite restricted at first glance. On the other hand however, Applicatives compose and parallelize easily, and provide several additional benefits, as we will see. Are these worth the restrictions?
In this talk, we are going to explore libraries like
optparse-applicative
that use an applicative DSL for extra benefit, and show the design of
an applicative DSL by the example of an Applicative test data
generator library.
Franz Thoma
Franz Thoma is originally a physicist and works as a consultant and software engineer at TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. While spending time there on domain specific languages and building compilers, he discovered his love for functional languages and expressive type systems. With Haskell, Franz found a robust and elegant language to express himself, which he uses for his own personal tooling as well as a thinking tool. At TNG, he currently works on high-throughput ingestion of real-time data for a client’s Big Data platform.
- Slides
- thoma.pdf
