Building a Bigger World
Last week we looked at some of the basic components of the Gloss library. We made simple animations and simulations, as well as a very simple "game" taking player input. This week, we're going to start making a more complex game!
Our game will involve navigating a maze, from start to finish. In fact, this week, we're not even going to make it very "mazy". We're just going to set up an open grid to navigate around with our player. But over the course of these next few weeks, we'll add more and more features, like enemies and hazards. At some point, we'll have so many features that we'll need a more organized scheme to keep track of everything. At that point, we'll discuss game architecture. You can take a look at the code for this game on our Github repository. For this part, you'll want to look at the part-1 branch.
Game programming is only one of the many interesting ways we can use Haskell. Take a look at our Production Checklist for some more ideas!
Making Our World
As we explored in the last part, the World type is central to how we define our game. It is a parameter to all the important functions we'll write. Before we define our World though, let's define a couple helper types. These will clarify many of our other functions.
-- Defined in Graphics.Gloss
-- Refers to (x, y) within the drawable coordinate system
type Point = (Float, Float)
-- Refers to discrete (x, y) within our game grid.
type Location = (Int, Int)
data GameResult = InProgress | PlayerWin | PlayerLossLet's start our World type now with a few simple elements. We'll imagine the game board as a grid with a fixed size, with the tiles having coordinates like (0,0) in the bottom left. We'll want a start location and an ending location for the maze. We'll also want to track the player's current location as well as the current "result" of the game:
data World = World
{ playerLocation :: Location
, startLocation :: Location
, endLocation :: Location
, gameResult :: GameResult
…
}Now we need to represent the "maze". In other words, we want to be able to track where the "walls" are in our grid. We'll make a data type to represent to boundaries for any particular cell. Then we'll stick a mapping from each location in our grid to its boundaries:
data BoundaryType = WorldBoundary | Wall | AdjacentCell Location
data CellBoundaries = CellBoundaries
{ upBoundary :: BoundaryType
, rightBoundary :: BoundaryType
, downBoundary :: BoundaryType
, leftBoundary :: BoundaryType
}
data World = World
{ …
, worldBoundaries :: Map Location CellBoundaries
}Populating Our World
Next week we'll look into how we can generate interesting mazes. But for now, our grid will only have "walls" on the outside, not in the middle. To start, we'll define a function that takes the number of rows and columns in our grid and a particular location. It will return the "boundaries" of the cell at that location. Each boundary tells us if there is a wall in one direction, or if we are clear to move to a different cell. All we need to check is if we're about to exceed the boundary in that direction.
simpleBoundaries :: (Int, Int) -> Location -> CellBoundaries
simpleBoundaries (numColumns, numRows) (x, y) = CellBoundaries
(if y + 1 < numRows
then AdjacentCell (x, y+1)
else WorldBoundary)
(if x + 1 < numColumns
then AdjacentCell (x+1, y)
else WorldBoundary)
(if y > 0 then AdjacentCell (x, y-1) else WorldBoundary)
(if x > 0 then AdjacentCell (x-1, y) else WorldBoundary)Our main function now will loop through all the different cells in our grid and make a map out of them:
boundariesMap :: (Int, Int) -> Map.Map Location CellBoundaries
boundariesMap (numColumns, numRows) = Map.fromList
(buildBounds <$> (range ((0,0), (numColumns, numRows))))
where
buildBounds :: Location -> (Location, CellBoundaries)
buildBounds loc =
(loc, simpleBoundaries (numColumns, numRows) loc)Now we have all the tools we need to populate our initial world:
main = play
windowDisplay
white
20
(World (0, 0) (0,0) (24, 24) InProgress (boundariesMap (25, 25))
drawingFunc ...
inputHandler …
updateFunc ...Drawing Our World
Now we need to draw our world. We'll begin by passing a couple new parameters to our drawing function. We'll need offset values that will tell us the Point in our geometric coordinate system for the Location (0,0). We'll also take a floating point value for the cell size. Then we will also, of course, take the World as a parameter:
drawingFunc :: (Float, Float) -> Float -> World -> Picture
drawingFunc (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize world = …Before we do anything else, let's define a type called CellCoordinates. This will contain the Points for the center and four corners of a cell in our grid.
data CellCoordinates = CellCoordinates
{ cellCenter :: Point
, cellTopLeft :: Point
, cellTopRight :: Point
, cellBottomLeft :: Point
, cellBottomRight :: Point
}Next, let's define a conversion function from a Location to one of the coordinate objects. This will take the offsets, cell size, and the desired location.
locationToCoords ::
(Float, Float) -> Float -> Location -> CellCoordinates
locationToCoords (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize (x, y) = CellCoordinates
(centerX, centerY) -- Center
(centerX - halfCell, centerY + halfCell) -- Top Left
(centerX + halfCell, centerY + halfCell) -- Top Right
(centerX - halfCell, centerY - halfCell) -- Bottom Left
(centerX + halfCell, centerY - halfCell) -- Bottom Right
where
(centerX, centerY) =
( xOffset + (fromIntegral x) * cellSize
, yOffset + (fromIntegral y) * cellSize)
halfCell = cellSize / 2.0Now we can go ahead and make the first few simple pictures in our game. We'll have colored polygons for the start and end locations, and a circle for the player token. The player marker is easiest:
drawingFunc (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize world =
Pictures [startPic, endPic, playerMarker]
where
conversion = locationToCoords (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize
(px, py) = cellCenter (conversion (playerLocation world))
playerMarker = translate px py (Circle 10)
startPic = …
endPic = ...We find its coordinates through our conversion, and then translate a circle. For our start and end points, we'll want to do something similar, except we want the corners, not the center. We'll use the corners as the points in our polygons and draw these polygons in appropriate colors.
drawingFunc (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize world =
Pictures [startPic, endPic, playerMarker]
where
conversion = locationToCoords (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize
...
startCoords = conversion (startLocation world)
endCoords = conversion (endLocation world)
startPic = Color blue (Polygon
[ cellTopLeft startCoords
, cellTopRight startCoords
, cellBottomRight startCoords
, cellBottomLeft startCoords
])
endPic = Color green (Polygon
[ cellTopLeft endCoords
, cellTopRight endCoords
, cellBottomRight endCoords
, cellBottomLeft endCoords
])Now we need to draw the wall lines. So we'll have to loop through the wall grid, drawing the relevant lines for each individual cell.
drawingFunc (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize world = Pictures
[mapGrid, startPic, endPic, playerMarker]
where
…
mapGrid = Pictures $concatMap makeWallPictures
(Map.toList (worldBoundaries world))
makeWallPictures :: (Location, CellBoundaries) -> [Picture]
makeWallPictures ((x, y), CellBoundaries up right down left) = ...When drawing the lines for an individual cell, we'll use thin lines when there is no wall. We can make these with the Line constructor and the two corner points. But we want a separate color and thickness to distinguish an impassable wall. In this second case, we'll want two extra points that are offset so we can draw a polygon. Here's a helper function we can use:
drawingFunc (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize world = ...
where
...
drawEdge :: (Point, Point, Point, Point) ->
BoundaryType -> Picture
drawEdge (p1, p2, _, _) (AdjacentCell _) = Line [p1, p2]
drawEdge (p1, p2, p3, p4) _ =
Color blue (Polygon [p1, p2, p3, p4])Now to apply this function, we'll need to do a little math to dig out all the individual coordinates out of this cell.
drawingFunc (xOffset, yOffset) cellSize world =
Pictures [mapGrid, startPic, endPic, playerMarker]
where
...
makeWallPictures :: (Location, CellBoundaries) -> [Picture]
makeWallPictures ((x,y), CellBoundaries up right down left) =
let coords = conversion (x,y)
tl@(tlx, tly) = cellTopLeft coords
tr@(trx, try) = cellTopRight coords
bl@(blx, bly) = cellBottomLeft coords
br@(brx, bry) = cellBottomRight coords
in [ drawEdge (tr, tl, (tlx, tly - 2), (trx, try - 2)) up
, drawEdge (br, tr, (trx-2, try), (brx-2, bry)) right
, drawEdge (bl, br, (brx, bry+2), (blx, bly+2)) down
, drawEdge (tl, bl, (blx+2, bly), (tlx+2, tly)) left
]But that's all we need! Now our drawing function is complete!
Player Input
The last thing we need is our input function. This is going to look a lot like it did last week. We'll only be looking at the arrow keys. And we'll be updating the player's coordinates if the move they entered is valid. To start, let's figure out how we get the bounds for the player's current cell (we'll assume the location is in our map).
inputHandler :: Event -> World -> World
inputHandler event w = case event of
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyUp) Down _ _) -> ...
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyDown) Down _ _) -> ...
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyRight) Down _ _) -> ...
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyLeft) Down _ _) -> ...
_ -> w
where
cellBounds = fromJust $ Map.lookup (playerLocation w) (worldBoundaries w)Now we'll define a function that will take an access function to the CellBoundaries. It will determine what our "next" location is.
inputHandler :: Event -> World -> World
inputHandler event w = case event of
...
where
nextLocation :: (CellBoundaries -> BoundaryType) -> Location
nextLocation boundaryFunc = case boundaryFunc cellBounds of
(AdjacentCell cell) -> cell
_ -> playerLocation wFinally, we pass the proper access function for the bounds with each direction, and we're done!
inputHandler :: Event -> World -> World
inputHandler event w = case event of
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyUp) Down _ _) ->
w { playerLocation = nextLocation upBoundary }
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyDown) Down _ _) ->
w { playerLocation = nextLocation downBoundary }
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyRight) Down _ _) ->
w { playerLocation = nextLocation rightBoundary }
(EventKey (SpecialKey KeyLeft) Down _ _) ->
w { playerLocation = nextLocation leftBoundary }
_ -> w
where
...Tidying Up
Now we can put everything together in our main function with a little bit of glue.
main :: IO ()
main = play
windowDisplay
white
20
(World (0, 0) (0,0) (24,24) (boundariesMap (25, 25)))
(drawingFunc (globalXOffset, globalYOffset) globalCellSize)
inputHandler
updateFunc
updateFunc :: Float -> World -> World
updateFunc _ = idNote that for now, we don't have much of an "update" function. Our world doesn't change over time. Yet! We'll see in the coming weeks what other features we can add that will make use of this.
Conclusion
So we've finished stage 1 of our simple game! You can explore the part-1 branch on our Github repository to look at the code if you want! Come back next week and we'll explore how we can actually create a true maze, instead of an open grid. This will involve some interesting algorithmic challenges!
For some more ideas of advanced Haskell libraries, check out our Production Checklist. You can also read our Web Skills Series for a more in-depth tutorial on some of those ideas.
Making a Glossy Game! (Part 1)
I've always had a little bit of an urge to try out game development. It wasn't something I associated with Haskell in the past. But recently, I started learning a bit about game architecural patterns. I stumbled on some ideas that seemed "Haskell-esque". I learned about the Entity-Component-System model, which suits typeclasses rather than object-oriented design.
So I've decided to do a few articles on writing a basic game in Haskell. We'll delve more into these architectural ideas later in the series. But to start, we have to learn a few building blocks! The first couple weeks will focus on the basics of the Gloss library. This library has some simple tools for creating 2D graphics that we can use to make a game. Frequent readers of this blog will note a lot of commonalities between Gloss and the Codeworld library we studied a while back. In this first part, we'll learn some basic combinators.
If you're looking for some more practical usages of Haskell, we have some tools for you! Download our Production Checklist to learn many interesting libraries you can use! You can also read our Haskell Web Skills series to go a bit more in depth!
A Basic Gloss Tutorial
The get started with the Gloss library, let's draw a simple picture using the display function. All this does is make a full screen window with a circle in the middle.
-- Always imported
import Graphics.Glass
main :: IO ()
main = display FullScreen white (Circle 80)All the arguments here are pretty straightforward. The program opens a full screen window and displays a circle against a white background. We can make the window smaller by using InWindow instead of FullScreen for the Display type. This takes a window "name", as well as dimensions for the size and offset of the window.
windowDisplay :: Display
windowDisplay = InWindow "Window" (200, 200) (10, 10)
main :: IO ()
main = display windowDisplay white (Circle 80)The primary argument here is this last one, a Picture using the Circle constructor. We can draw many different things, including circles, lines, boxes, text, and so on. The Picture type also allows for translation, rotation, and aggregation of other pictures.
Animating
We can take our drawing to the next level by using the animate function. Instead of only drawing a static picture, we'll take the animation time as an input to a function. Here's how we can provide an animation of a growing circle:
main = animate windowDisplay white animationFunc
animationFunc :: Float -> Picture
animationFunc time = Circle (2 * time)Simulating
The next stage of our program's development is to add a model. This allows us to add state to our animation so that it is no longer merely a function of the time. For our next example, we'll make a pendulum. We'll keep two pieces of information in our model. These are the current angle ("theta") and the derivative of that angle ("dtheta"). The simulate function takes more arguments than animate. Here's the skeleton of how we use it. We'll go over the new arguments one-by-one.
type Model = (Float, Float)
main = simulate
displayWindow
white
simulationRate
initialModel
drawingFunc
updateFunc
where
simulationRate :: Int
simulationRate = 20
initialModel :: Model
initialModel = (0,0)
drawingFunc :: Model -> Picture
drawingFunc (theta, dtheta) = …
updateFunc :: ViewPort -> Float -> Model -> Model
updateFunc _ dt (theta, dtheta) = ...The first extra argument (simulationRate) tells us how many model steps per second. Then we have our initial model. Then there's a function taking the model and telling us how to draw the picture. We'll fill this in to draw a line at the appropriate angle.
drawingFunc :: Model -> Picture
drawingFunc (theta, dtheta) = Line [(0, 0), (50 * cos theta, 50 * sin theta)]Finally, we have an updating function. This takes the view-port, which we won't use. It also takes the amount of time for this simulation step (dt). Then it takes a current model. It uses these to determine the new model. We can fill this in with a little bit of trigonometry. Then we'll have a working pendulum simulation!
updateFunc :: ViewPort -> Float -> Model -> Model
updateFunc _ dt (theta, dtheta) = (theta + dt * dtheta, dtheta - dt * (cos theta))Playing a Game
The final element we need to make a playable game is to accept user input. The play function provides us what we need here. It looks like the simulate function except for an extra function for handling input. We're going to make a game where the user can move a circle around with the arrow keys. We'll add an extra mechanic where the circle keeps trying to move back towards the center. Here's the skeleton:
type World = (Float, Float)
main :: IO ()
main = play
windowDisplay
white
20
(0, 0)
drawingFunc
inputHandler
updateFunc
drawingFunc :: World -> Picture
drawingFunc (x, y) = ...
inputHandler :: Event -> World -> World
inputHandler event (x, y) = ...
updateFunc :: Float -> World -> World
updateFunc dt (x, y) = ...Our World will represent the current location of our circle. The drawing function will draw a simple circle, translated by this amount.
drawingFunc :: World -> Picture
drawingFunc (x, y) = translate x y (Circle 20)Now for our input handler, we only care about a few inputs. We'll read the up/down/left/right arrows, and adjust the coordinates:
inputHandler :: Event -> World -> World
inputHandler (EventKey (SpecialKey KeyUp) Down _ _) (x, y) = (x, y + 10)
inputHandler (EventKey (SpecialKey KeyDown) Down _ _) (x, y) = (x, y - 10)
inputHandler (EventKey (SpecialKey KeyRight) Down _ _) (x, y) = (x + 10, y)
inputHandler (EventKey (SpecialKey KeyLeft) Down _ _) (x, y) = (x - 10, y)
inputHandler _ w = wFinally, let's write our "update" function. This will keep trying to move the circle's coordinates towards the center of the frame:
updateFunc :: Float -> World -> World
updateFunc _ (x, y) = (towardCenter x, towardCenter y)
where
towardCenter :: Float -> Float
towardCenter c = if abs c < 0.25
then 0
else if c > 0
then c - 0.25
else c + 0.25And that's it, we have our miniature game!
Conclusion
Hopefully this article gave you a good, quick overview on the basics of the Gloss library. Next week, we'll start making a more complicated game with a more interesting model!
We have other resources for the more adventurous Haskellers out there! Download our Production Checklist and read our Haskell Web Skills Series!
Extending Haskell's Syntax!
When you're starting out with Haskell, compiler extensions seem a little weird. And in a way, they are. It's strange to think that you need to "opt in" to certain compiler features. And as a beginner, it can be overwhelming to think you need to know the meaning of certain odd terms. I still remember how some of the first Haskell code I worked on had at least 10 extensions in every file. And I didn't have a clue what they meant!
But there are good reasons for certain features to be "opt in". They might make the compilation process longer. Or they might make some types of code less performant. But there are many extensions you can use that can make you life easier without worrying. And many extensions are easy to learn, so you can get the hang of the concept.
In this article, we’re going to do a quick run-down of some simple extensions. You’ve probably heard of at least of few of these. But it’s always good to keep learning. None of these are too advanced. For the most part, they allow you to use some more syntactic sugar and write cleaner code. So they’re pretty uncontroversial and you should feel free to use them in any file you want. Learning a few of these will help you get more comfortable so you can tackle harder extensions when you need to.
For some more tools to take your Haskell to the next level, download our Production Checklist! You can also read our Haskell Web Series for some tutorials.
Overloaded Strings
We’ve done one article already on overloaded strings. But here’s another quick summary. There are five different string types in Haskell. By default, Haskell assumes that whenever you use a string literal, you intend for it to be the String type.
-- Defaults as String
aString = "Hello"
-- The following will NOT WORK (by default)
aText :: Text
aText = "Hello"This is annoying, because String is generally inferior to the other string types. You should be using Text most of the time for performance reasons. If we use the OverloadedStrings extension, then we can use literals for any of these string types!
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
-- Now this works!
aText :: Text
aText = "Hello"
aByteString :: ByteString
aByteString = "Hello"And, in fact, you can use string literals for any type you want! All you have to do is create an instance of the IsString class for it by defining the fromString function.
newtype Name = Name String
instance IsString Name where
fromString s = Name s
myName :: Name
myName = "James"This is one of the most common and simplest extensions you can use, so it's a great one to start with!
Lambda Case
Lambda case is another simple extension, but it isn’t quite as common as overloaded strings. It helps clean up a particular syntax wart that comes up from time to time. Consider a function where we take a single argument, and then immediately run a case statement on it:
useParseResult :: Either ParseError Result -> IO ()
useParseResult x = case x of
Left parseError -> …
Right goodResult -> ...You could do a direct pattern match, but sometimes this is impossible if you’re in-lining the function. Notice that we use a one-letter variable name x. We could come up with a better name. But it seems like a waste since we don't use this variable anywhere else in the function definition. If would be nice if we could remove it altogether.
The LambdaCase extension allows this by providing the following syntactic sugar. You can use case as if it were the argument of a lambda expression, and then immediately do the pattern match:
{-# LANGUAGE LambdaCase #-}
useParserResult :: EitherParseError Result -> IO ()
useParserResult = \case ->
Left parseError -> ...
Right goodResult -> ...At the end of the day, it’s a small difference. But it's a nice little trick you can use to save yourself some unneeded variable names.
Bang Patterns
Haskell is lazy by default. But there are certain situations where you need a strict value as an input to your function. This means the value should get evaluated BEFORE the function gets run. This is a little tricky to do with normal Haskell syntax. Consider this function:
bangTest :: Bool -> Int -> Int
bangTest b i = if b then 42 else 2 * iIf the boolean is true, laziness means we never evaluate the int argument. Hence the following works:
>> bangTest True undefined
42But if we want that situation to fail, we need to use seq:
bangTest b i = seq i $ if b then 42 else 2 * i
…
>> bangTest True undefined
***Exception: Prelude.undefinedThe BangPatterns extension allows us to use the bang character ! to specify that the function should be strict in an argument. So instead of using seq like above, we can get the same behavior like so:
bangTest :: Bool -> Int -> Int
bangTest b !i = if b then 42 else 2 * i
…
>> bangTest True undefined
***Exception: Prelude.undefinedEven without this extension, you can use strictness annotations in type definitions. Consider this example:
data Person = Person String
printName :: Bool -> Person -> IO ()
printName b (Person name) = if b
then putStrLn "Hello"
else putStrLn name
…
>> printName True (Person undefined)
HelloBut we can also make person strict in its string argument like so:
data Person = Person !String
…
>> printName True (Person undefined)
*** Exception: Prelude.undefinedAnd again, this last example works even without the extension!
Type Operators
Haskell is sometimes criticized for an abundance of confusing operators. This next syntax extension does not ease this criticism! But it does provide some neat new possibilities when defining types! Here's an example with the Servant library. It requires both DataKinds and TypeOperators, but we'll focus on the latter.
{-# LANGUAGE DataKinds #-}
{-# LANGUAGE TypeOperators #-}
type PersonAPI =
"person" :> Capture "personid" Int :> Get '[JSON] Person
:<|> "person" :> ReqBody '[JSON] Person :> Post '[JSON] IntAs a reminder, we've defined a type up there, not a normal expression! This means the :> and :<|> operators are actually constructors! Let's define an example for ourselves. Suppose we have a simple type that wraps a couple other types in a pair:
data MyPair a b = MyPair a b
collection :: MyPair [Int] [String]
...Now suppose we want to join more types together. We can do this by nesting MyPair instances, but the type signatures will get messy:
bigCollection :: MyPair [Int] (MyPair [String] (Map String Int))But we can define a type operator that allows us to join these together!
infixr 8 +>>
type (t1 +>> t2) = MyPair t1 t2And now we can get far cleaner signatures!
collection :: [Int] +>> [String]
bigCollection :: [Int] +>> [String] +>> Map String IntHaskell lets us make complex recursive structures with many different type parameters. Type operators help us keep the signatures concise when we do this!
Tuple Sections
We've got one last trick for you. The TupleSections extension makes tuples easier to work with. Even without an extension can use the comma operator to build tuples like so:
combined :: (Int, String)
combined = (,) 5 "Hello"
combined3 :: (Int, String, Float)
combined3 = (,,) 5 "Hello" 2.3But suppose we want to apply a function where we hardcode a particular value of a tuple. We'd need a separate definition of this function:
injectHello :: Int -> Float -> (Int, String, Float)
injectHello i f = (i, "Hello", f)
fetchInt :: IO Int
fetchFloat :: IO Float
combined :: IO (Int, String, Float)
combined = injectHello <$> fetchInt <*> fetchFloatBut with TupleSections, we can create a constructor that already has "Hello" built in! We can then apply it as a function with using another definition!
{-# LANGUAGE TupleSections #-}
combined :: IO (Int, String, Float)
combined = (,"Hello",) <$> fetchInt <*> fetchFloatThis is another useful little trick that let's us skip annoying in-between definitions. When you add up all these small things, it can go a long way towards cleaner code!
Conclusion
The ecosystem of Haskell compiler extensions is very large. As a beginner, it can be hard to know where to start. But many extensions are simple. In this article, we went over a couple simple ones and a couple more complicated ones. Once you get familiar with one or two, the concept starts making a lot more sense.
For some more ideas on taking your Haskell to the next level, check out our Production Checklist! It has a list of libraries for cool purposes like writing servers and using databases!
Modifying a Library!
Sometime last year, I wrote an article about advanced Stack techniques. We discussed one hypothetical case where a library had a bug. The solution here was to fork the repository and use a Github location in stack.yaml.
I recently came across an easy example of doing this and thought I'd share it. We can see how to incorporate the change without stressing about its complexity. Even if you're only a beginner, this is a good skill to learn now!
You'll need some background on Stack first though! If you've never used Stack before, take a look at our Stack mini-course to learn more!
Background
I've been doing a bit of work lately with the persistent-migration library. This library lets us set up manual migrations for a Persistent schema we've set up through template Haskell. See this article for more on that topic.
The migrations library has a couple functions that let us run some SQL operations. They live in the SqlPersistT monad, as we would expect. However, something's a little off about them:
getMigration ::
MigrateSettings -> Migration -> SqlPersistT IO [MigrateSql]
runMigration ::
MigrateSettings -> Migration -> SqlPersistT IO ()We can see that these functions restrict us to using SqlPersistT on top of the normal IO monad. But in most cases with Persistent, I use the withPostgresqlConn function. This adds a MonadLogger constraint. Thus IO doesn't cut it. Most functions have a type signature looking like this:
databaseOp :: SqlPersistT (LoggingT IO) aSo we can't interoperate as easily as we'd like between our normal database operations, and these migration functions. The solution is that the migration functions should be more general in what monads they can use. This will be an easy fix, as we'll see. But first, we have to find a way to get our own version of the code.
Getting Started
The persistent-migration library is on Github here. So we can make a fork of the repository, and clone that to our machine:
git clone https://github.com/jhb563/peristent-migrationNow we'll follow the build instructions in the Developing.md file to get set up. Some of the tests fail on my machine, but we'll ignore that for this article.
Making Our Code Fixes
The code fixes turn out to be very easy. We can go into the relevant module and change the type signatures so they are more general:
module Database.Persistent.Migration.Postgres where
...
getMigration :: (MonadIO m) =>
MigrateSettings -> Migration -> SqlPersistT m [MigrateSql]
runMigration :: (MonadIO m) =>
MigrateSettings -> Migration -> SqlPersistT m ()Even in the worst case, the only changes we would need to make here would be to add liftIO calls in various places. But it turns out that this change doesn't break anything! The library still builds, and all the tests that were passing before still pass.
So now we can commit this change to our fork and push it to the repository.
Incorporating the Fix
Now we have to use our own fork as an alternative to the version of the library on Hackage. Before, the extra-deps section in ourstack.yaml` looked like this:
extra-deps:
- persistent-migration-0.1.0This indicates we would grab the code from Hackage. But now we can use an alternative package format to reference our Github repository. Here's what we change it to:
extra-deps:
- git: https://github.com/jhb563/persistent-migration.git
commit: 9f9c5035efeAnd now we've got our own fork as a dependency for our project! We can write code like so:
doMigrations :: SqlPersistT (LoggingT IO) a
doMigrations = do
runMigration defaultSettings migration
...And everything works! Our code builds!
Potential Issues
Now, an approach like this can lead to some possible issues. We're now disconnected from the original repository. So if there was a new release, we'd have to do a bit more work to pull those changes into our own repository. Still, this isn't too difficult. One solution to this is to submit a pull request with our changes. If it gets accepted, they'll be in the next release! Then we can go back to using the version on Hackage!
Conclusion
In this article, we did a quick overview of how to make our own changes to libraries. We cloned the repository, made a code change, and added our fork as a dependency. Obviously, most of the changes you'll want to make aren't as simple as this one was. But it's good to use an example where all we're doing is tackling the issue of getting the code into our code base!
For a broad overview of how to use the Stack program, make sure to check out of Stack Mini-course! If you've never written any Haskell before, you can also look at our Beginners Checklist!
Shareable Haskell with Jupyter!
In the last couple weeks, we've discussed a couple options for Haskell IDEs, like Atom and IntelliJ. But there's another option I'll talk about this week. Both our IDE setups are still most useful for fully-fledged projects. But if you're writing some quick and dirty one-off code, they can be a little cumbersome to work with.
This other option is Jupyter with IHaskell. It's like IPython, for those who have used that. I got the idea when the good folks at Tweag made a blog post with it. Jupyter was originally intended for making quick Python data science scripts. It allows a nice UI for making data visualizations. Thanks to the hard work of Andrew Gibiansky, there is a Haskell kernel for Jupyter! In this article, we'll discuss some quick approaches to using it.
IHaskell is actually a great tool when you're first learning Haskell! If you've never programmed in Haskell before, you can read our Liftoff Series and follow along with the code examples! You can write them using IHaskell instead of making a Stack project!
Installing
If you want to make a full-fledged Jupyter notebook, you'll need to install Jupyter first. The most heavy-duty but easiest way would be to use the Anaconda distribution. But there are also other options like pip.
After that, you'll need to install the Haskell kernel for it. Unfortunately, you can't do this on a Windows machine. You either need a Mac, Linux or a virtual box. The instructions for these systems are well documented in the README. In short, you need to sort out your Python dependencies, grab the Github repo, and build the project.
Now if you're on Windows, or you don't want to install the full Jupyter system, you can try out IHaskell online. Head to this Binder page, make a new notebook, and get cracking!
Making a Basic Example
In our notebook, we can write Haskell code as if we're in a file, but evaluate it as if we're in GHCI. A quick look at the .cabal file will reveal the libraries we have easy access to in this notebook setup. We can see for instance that we have stalwarts such as mtl, aeson, and split. Using this last library, we can write the following snippet:
Then we press shift+enter to finish the cell and it gets evaluated. Evaluations work as in GHCI. Anything you assign to a variable name will be usable later on in your notebook. Then the final expression you put will get printed. So we'll see output like so:
Then we can use the items we named in another snippet like this:
Since we also have access to the Aeson library, we can serialize our list like so:
As a final note it is easy to create multiline definitions and use those! This is a big improvement over GHCI. It would be very annoying to define a new data type, for instance:
Exporting the Notebook
Now one of the awesome things about Jupyter notebooks is that it's easy to share your work! There's an option off the file menu for downloading your notebooks. There are a great many options, including Haskell source files, pdfs, and HTML documents. These last two can be extremely useful if you want to make a presentation!
Conclusion
As I move forward with MMH, I'm definitely going to explore using notebooks like this more. It should provide a better reader experience than what I have now. I'll also be looking at migrating some of our existing permanent content to Jupyter. The lack of Windows functionality for Haskell is unfortunate, but I'll find a way around it.
Jupyter IHaskell is a great way to get familiar with the basics of Haskell without downloading any of the tools. But at some point, you'll need these! Read our Liftoff Series and download our Beginners Checklist to find out more!
Another IDEa: Haskell and IntelliJ!
Last week we explored one way to get a nice development environment for Haskell. We used the Atom text editor, which has a couple Haskell plugins and is quite hackable.
But there's another option I hadn't considered at all during that article. This is the IntelliJ IDE. It's primary use is Java and Android development. But like Atom, Visual Studio, and other IDEs, it has a rich library of plugins. And one of these is a Haskell environment!
This week, we'll see how to configure IntelliJ to work with Haskell. We'll see how we can get a nifty Haskell environment set up with the same features we had in Atom. I'm working on a Windows machine, but you should be able to do all these steps on a Mac as well.
An IDE is no substitute for basic knowledge though! If you're new to Haskell, getting a good dev setup will help. But you should also read our Liftoff Series and download our Beginners Checklist! These will give you some other tools you'll need!
Installation and Setup
Getting started with IntelliJ is quite easy. Installing the editor works through the normal wizard. You'll have a lot of options for different plugins to install immediately. A lot of these are Java specific so you won't need them. But once you've done that you can also install the IntelliJ-Haskell plugin. In my case, I also installed a Vim plugin for those keybindings.
There's a little bit of trickiness involved in setting your project up to build with Stack. When you first install the plugin, it will ask you what program to use to "build" a project. This means you'll need to locate your stack executable in the file finder so you can drag it in. On Windows this will mean showing hidden folders in the finder. You might also need to use the where command in the terminal to help (instead of which from Linux). Once you've done this though, you should be good!
Keyboard Shortcuts
When working with Atom, we stressed the importance of keyboard shortcuts. These can streamline our workflow a lot. IntelliJ also allows a good deal of customization options for these. The main thing to know is that you need to hit ctrl+alt+s to get to the settings menu. Then you can find the keymap on the side panel. From here you can customize pretty much anything. The big ones for me were building the project and manipulating panels.
The ability to search for commands is very useful. I found it a lot easier to alter commands for, say, splitting windows then I did in Atom. My current setup involves the following combinations:
Build Project: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B
Split Screen Vertically: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Right
Split Screen Horizontally: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Down
Next/Previous Split: Ctrl+Shift+[Right/Left]
Unsplit: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U
Toggle Bottom Terminal: Ctrl+Shift+UpFor what it's worth, I'll also note that the Vim keybindings are better than I had in Atom. Moving around with lines and saving files with :w work, for a couple examples.
Haskell Features
This is where the IntelliJ plugin shines. Lots of features work right out of the box. For instance, it knows to using hlint and highlights any code with lints. Compilation hints show up automatically. There's even a good deal of auto-completion from libraries for expressions and types. Integration with Hoogle is fairly straightforward.
Best of all, it seems to me that these features work across projects with different GHC versions. As far as I can tell you don't need to manually install ghc-mod and worry about it's version, as you did with Atom. Given the difficulties I had setting up Atom to work with these features, this was a major relief.
Git Integrations
We didn't go over version control last week. But it's another vital component in any developer's workflow, so IDE integration is a big plus. Both Atom and IntelliJ have good support for Github, which is excellent news! Both come with batteries included when it comes to all the common Git operations we want. You can make new branches, add commits, push and pull with ease. Both allow you to bind these to keys, allowing you the freedom to streamline your workflow even more.
Disadvantages
If I were to find one fault with my IntelliJ setup, it's that project setup can involve a lot of loading time. When you add a new library to the .cabal file, you need to run the Tools->Haskell->Update Settings command. The IDE will take a little while to reset everything to account for this. Having said that, a lot of that loading time goes into getting all the appropriate libraries to set up. This enables all the nice features I mentioned earlier. So I suppose that's the price you pay. Atom is also sometimes slow, for its part. But the program itself isn't quite as bulky as IntelliJ, which has a lot of extra features you probably won't need.
One last note is that IntelliJ will add a .idea folder to your project directory. Make sure to add this to your .gitignore!
Conclusion
All in all working with IntelliJ/HaskelIDE has been a good experience so far. It has all the features I'm looking for, and setup is a bit easier than Atom. Long loads can hold me back at times, but it's usually fine. Again, you can take a look at the Github page for the project for some more details. I highly recommend trying out this plugin! Much love to Rik van der Kleij, the author!
A full IDE setup will really help you get started learning Haskell! But you also need some other tools and knowledge. Download our Beginners Checklist for some other tools you'll need. Also take a look at our Stack mini-course to learn more about setting up a Haskell project!
Upgrading My Development Setup!
In the last year or so, I haven't actually written as much Haskell as I'd like to. There are a few reasons for this. First, I switched to a non-Haskell job, meaning I was now using my Windows laptop for all my Haskell coding. Even on my previous work laptop (a Mac), things weren't easy. Haskell doesn't have a real IDE, like IntelliJ for Java or XCode for iOS development.
Besides not having an IDE, Windows presents extra pains compared to the more developer-friendly Mac. And it finally dawned on me. If I, as an experienced developer, was having this much friction, it must be a nightmare for beginners. Many people must be trying to both learn the language AND fight against their dev setup. So I decided to take some time to improve how I program so that it'll be easier for me to actually do it.
I wanted good general functionality, but also some Haskell-specific functions. I did a decent amount of research and settled on Atom as my editor of choice. In this article, we'll explore the basics of setting up Atom, what it offers, and the Haskell tools we can use within it. If you're just starting out with Haskell, I hope you can take these tips to make your Haskell Journey easier.
Note that many tips in this article won't work without the Haskell platform! To start with Haskell, download our Beginners Checklist, or read our Liftoff Series!
Goals
It's always good to begin with the end in mind. So before we start out, let's establish some goals for our development environment. A lot of these are basic items we should have regardless of what language we're using.
- Autocomplete. Must have for terms within the file. Nice to have for extra library functions and types.
- Syntax highlighting.
- Should be able to display at least two code files side-by-side, should also be able to open extra files in tabs.
- Basic file actions should only need the keyboard. These include opening new files to new tabs or splitting the window and opening a new file in the pane.
- Should be able to build code using the keyboard only. Should be able to examine terminal output and code at the same time.
- Should be able to format code automatically (using, for instance, Hindent)
- Some amount of help filling in library functions and basic types. Should be able to coordinate types from other files.
- Partial compilation. If I make an obvious mistake, the IDE should let me know immediately.
- Vim keybindings (depends on your preference of course)
With these goals in mind, let's go ahead and see how Atom can help us.
Basics of Atom
Luckily, the installation process for Atom is pretty painless. Using the Windows installer comes off without a hitch for me. Out of the box, Atom fulfills most of the basic requirements we'd have for an IDE. In fact, we get all our 1-4 goals without putting in any effort. The trick is that we have to learn a few keybindings. The following are what you'll need to open files.
- Ctrl+P - Open a new tab with a file using fuzzy find
- Ctrl+K + Direction (left/right/up/down arrow) - Open a new pane (will initially have the same file as before).
- Ctrl+K + Ctrl+Direction - Switch pane focus
Those commands solve requirements 3 and 4 from our goals list.
Another awesome thing about Atom is the extensive network of easy-to-install plugins. We'll look at some Haskell specific items below. But to start, we can use the package manager to install vim-mode-improved. This allows most Vim keybindings, fulfilling requirement 9 from above. There are a few things to re-learn with different keystrokes, but it works all right.
Adding Our Own Keybindings
Since Atom is so Hackable, you can also add your own keybindings and change ones you don't like. We'll do one simple example here, but you can also check out the documentation for some more ideas. One thing we'll need for goal #5 is to make it easier to bring up the bottom panel within atom. This is where terminal output goes when we run a command. You'll first want to open up keymap.cson, which you can do by going to the file menu and click Keymap….
Then you can add the following lines at the bottom:
'atom-workspace':
'ctrl-shift-down': 'window:toggle-bottom-dock'
'ctrl-shift-up': 'window:toggle-bottom-dock'First, we scope the command to the entire atom workspace. (We'll see an example below of a command with a more limited scope). Then we assign the Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow key combination to toggle the bottom dock. Since it's a toggle command, we could repeat the command to move it both up and down. But this isn't very intuitive, so we add the second line so that we can also use the up arrow to bring it up.
A super helpful tool is the key binding resolver. At any point, you can use ctrl+. (control key plus the period key) to bring up the resolver. Then pressing any key combination will bring up the commands Atom will run for it. It will highlight the one it will pick in case of conflicts. This is great for finding unassigned key combinations!
Haskell Mode in Atom
Now let's start looking at adding some Haskell functionality to our editor. We'll start by installing a few different Haskell-related packages in Atom. You don't need all these, but this is a list of the core packages suggested in the Atom documentation.
language-haskell
ide-haskell
ide-haskell-cabal
haskell-ghc-mod
autocomplete-haskelThe trickier part of getting Haskell functionality is the binary dependencies. A couple of the packages we added depend on having a couple programs installed. The most prominent of these is ghc-mod, which exposes some functionality of GHC. You'll also want a code formatter, such as hindent, or stylish-haskell installed.
At the most basic level, it's easy to install these programs with Stack. You can run the command:
stack install ghc-mod stylish-haskellHowever, ghc-mod matches up with a specific version of GHC. The command above installs the binaries at a system-wide level. This means you can only have the version for one GHC version installed at a time. So imagine you have one project using GHC 8.0, and another project using GHC 8.2. You won't be able to get Haskell features for each one at the same time using this approach. You would need to re-install the proper version whenever you switched projects.
As a note, there are a couple ways to ensure you know what version you've installed. First, you can run the stack install ghc-mod command from within the particular project directory. This will use that project's LTS to resolve which version you need. You can also modify the install command like so:
stack --resolver lts-9 install ghc-modThere is an approach where you can install different, compiler specific versions of the binary on your system, and have Atom pick the correct one. I haven't been able to make this approach work yet. But you can read about that approach on Alexis King's blog post here.
Keybinding for Builds
Once we have that working, we'll have met most of our feature goals. We'll have partial compilation and some Haskell specific autocompletion. There are other packages, such as haskell-hoogle that you can install for even more features.
There's one more feature we want though, which is to be able to build our project from the keyboard. When we installed our Haskell packages, Atom added a "Haskell IDE" menu at the top. We can use this to build our project with "Haskell IDE" -> "Builder" -> "Build Project". We can add a keybinding for this command like so.
'atom-text-editor[data-grammer~/"haskell"]':
...
'ctrl-alt-shift-b': 'ide-haskell-cabal:build'Notice that we added a namespace here, so this command will only run on Haskell files. Now we can build our project at any time with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+B, which will really streamline our development!
Weaknesses
The biggest weakness with Atom Haskell-mode is binary dependencies and GHC versions. The idea behind Stack is that switching to a different project with a different compiler shouldn't be hard. But there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get editor support. To be fair though, these problems are not exclusive to Atom.
Another weakness is that the Haskell plugins for Atom currently only support up through LTS 9 (GHC 8). This is a big weakness if you're looking to use new features from the cutting edge of GHC development. So Atom Haskell-mode might not be fully-featured for industry projects or experimental work.
As a further note, the Vim mode in Atom doesn't give all the keybindings you might expect from Vim. For example, I could no longer use the colon key plus a number to jump to a line. Of course, Atom has its own bindings for these things. But it takes a little while to re-learn the muscle memory.
Alternatives
There are, of course, alternatives to the approach I've laid out in this article. Many plugins/packages exist enabling you to get good Haskell features with Emacs and Vim. For Emacs, you should look at haskell-mode. For Vim, I made the most progress following this article from Stephen Diehl. I'll say for my part that I haven't tried the Emacs approach, and ran into problems a couple times with Vim. But with enough time and effort, you can get them to work!
If you use Visual Studio, there are a couple packages for Haskell: Haskelly and Haskero. I haven't used either of these, but they both seem provide a lot of nice features.
Conclusion
Having a good development environment is one of the keys to programming success. More popular languages have full-featured IDE's that make programming a lot easier. Haskell doesn't have this level of support. But there's enough community help that you can use a hackable editor like Atom to get most of what you want. Since I fixed this glaring weakness, I've been able to write Haskell much more efficiently. If you're starting out with the language, this can make or break your experience! So it's worth investing at least a little bit of time and effort to ensure you've got a smooth system to work with.
Of course, having an editor setup for Haskell is meaningless if you've never used the language! Download our Beginners Checklist or read our Liftoff Series to get going!
Haskell Data Types Review!
This week we're taking a quick break from new content. We've added our new series on Haskell's data system to our permanent collection. You can find it under the beginners panel or check it out here! This series had five parts. Let's take a quick review:
- In part 1 we reviewed the basic way to construct data types in Haskell. We compared this to the syntax of other langauges like Java and Python.
- Part 2 showed the simple way we can extend our Haskell types to make them sum types! We saw that this is a more difficult process in other languages. In fact, we resorted to making different inherited types in object oriented languages.
- Next, we demonstrated the concept of parametric types in part 3. We saw how little we needed to add to Haskell's definitions to make this work. Again, we looked at comparable examples in other languages as well.
- In part 4, we delved into Haskell's typeclasses. We compared them against inherited types from OO languages and noted some pros and cons.
- Finally, in part 5 we concluded the series by exploring the idea of type families. Our code was more complicated than we'd need in other languages. And yet, our code contains a lot more behavioral guarantees in Haskell than it does elsewhere. And we achieved this while still having a good deal of flexibility. Type families have a definite learning curve, but they're a useful concept to know.
As always keeping coming back every Monday morning for some new Haskell content! For more updates and our monthly newsletter, make sure you Subscribe! This will also give you access to our Subscriber Resources!
Why Haskell V: Type Families
Welcome to the conclusion of our series on Haskell data types! We've gone over a lot of things in this series that demonstrated Haskell's simplicity. We compared Haskell against other languages where we saw more cumbersome syntax. In this final part, we'll see something a bit more complicated though. We'll do a quick exploration of the idea of type families. We'll start by tracing the evolution of some related type ideas, and then look at a quick example.
Type families are a rather advanced concept. But if you're more of a beginner, we've got plenty of other resources to help you out! Take a look at our Getting Started Checklist or our Liftoff Series!
Different Kinds of Type Holes
In this series so far, we've seen a couple different ways to "plug in a hole", as far as a type or class definition goes. In the third part of this series we explored parametric types. These have type variables as part of their definition. We can view each type variable as a hole we need to fill in with another type.
Then in the fourth part, we explored the concept of typeclasses. For any instance of a typeclass, we're plugging in the holes of the function definitions of that class. We fill in each hole with an implementation of the function for that particular type.
This week, we're going to combine these ideas to get type families! A type family is an enhanced class where one or more of the "holes" we fill in is actually a type! This allows us to associate different types with each other. The result is that we can write special kinds of polymorphic functions.
A Basic Logger
First, here's a contrived example to use through this article. We want to have a logging typeclass. We'll call it MyLogger. We'll have two main functions in this class. We should be able to get all the messages in the log in chronological order. Then we should be able to log a new message while sending some sort of effect. A first pass at this class might look like this:
class MyLogger logger where
prevMessages :: logger -> [String]
logString :: String -> logger -> loggerWe can make a slight change that would use the State monad instead of passing the logger as an argument:
class MyLogger logger where
prevMessages :: logger -> [String]
logString :: String -> State logger ()But this class is deficient in an important way. We won't be able to have any effects associated with our logging. What if we want to save the log message in a database, send it over network connection, or log it to the console? We could allow this, while still keeping prevMessages pure like so:
class MyLogger logger where
prevMessages :: logger -> [String]
logString :: String -> StateT logger IO ()Now our logString function can use arbitrary effects. But this has the obvious downside that it forces us to introduce the IO monad places where we don't need it. If our logger doesn't need IO, we don't want it. So what do we do?
Type Family Basics
One answer is to make our class a type family. W do this with the type keyword in the class defintion. First, we need a few language pragmas to allow this:
{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleInstances #-}
{-# LANGUAGE FlexibleContexts #-}
{-# LANGUAGE AllowAmbiguousTypes #-}Now we'll make a type within our class that refers to the monadic effect type of the logString function. We have to describe the "kind" of the type with the definition. Since it's a monad, its kind is * -> *. This indicates that it requires another type parameter. Here's what our definition looks like:
class MyLogger logger where
type LoggerMonad logger :: * -> *
prevMessages :: logger -> [String]
logString :: String -> (LoggerMonad logger) ()Some Simple Instances
Now that we have our class, let's make an instance that does NOT involve IO. We'll use a simple wrapper type for our logger. Our "monad" will contain the logger in a State. Then all we do when logging a string is change the state!
newtype ListWrapper = ListWrapper [String]
instance MyLogger ListWrapper where
type (LoggerMonad ListWrapper) = State ListWrapper
prevMessages (ListWrapper msgs) = reverse msgs
logString s = do
(ListWrapper msgs) <- get
put $ ListWrapper (s : msgs)Now we can make a version of this that starts involving IO, but without any extra "logging" effects. Instead of using a list for our state, we'll use a mapping from timestamps to the messages. When we log a string, we'll use IO to get the current time and store the string in the map with that time.
newtype StampedMessages = StampedMessages (Data.Map.Map UTCTime String)
instance MyLogger StampedMessages where
type (LoggerMonad StampedMessages) = StateT StampedMessages IO
prevMessages (StampedMessages msgs) = Data.Map.elems msgs
logString s = do
(StampedMessages msgs) <- get
currentTime <- lift getCurrentTime
put $ StampedMessages (Data.Map.insert currentTime s msgs)More IO
Now for a couple examples that use IO in a traditional logging way while also storing the messages. Our first example is a ConsoleLogger. It will save the message in its State but also log the message to the console.
newtype ConsoleLogger = ConsoleLogger [String]
instance MyLogger ConsoleLogger where
type (LoggerMonad ConsoleLogger) = StateT ConsoleLogger IO
prevMessages (ConsoleLogger msgs) = reverse msgs
logString s = do
(ConsoleLogger msgs) <- get
lift $ putStrLn s
put $ ConsoleLogger (s : msgs)Another option is to write our messages to a file! We'll store the file name as part of our state, though we could use the Handle if we wanted.
newtype FileLogger = FileLogger (String, [String])
instance MyLogger FileLogger where
type (LoggerMonad FileLogger) = StateT FileLogger IO
prevMessages (FileLogger (_, msgs)) = reverse msgs
logString s = do
(FileLogger (filename, msgs)) <- get
handle <- lift $ openFile filename AppendMode
lift $ hPutStrLn handle s
lift $ hClose handle
put $ FileLogger (filename, s : msgs)And we can imagine that we would have a similar situation if we wanted to send the logs over the network. We would use our State to store information about the destination server. Or else we could add something like Servant's ClientM monad to our stack in the type definition.
Using Our Logger
By defining our class like this, we can now write a polymorphic function that will work with any of our loggers!
runComputations :: (Logger logger, Monad (LoggerMonad logger)) => InputType -> (LoggerMonad logger) ResultType
runComputations input = do
logString "Starting Computation!"
let x = firstFunction input
logString "Finished First Computation!"
let y = secondFunction x
logString "Finished Second Computation!"
return yThis is awesome because our code is now abstracted away from the needed effects. We could call this with or without the IO monad.
Comparing to Other Languages
Now, to be fair, this is one area of Haskell's type system that makes it a bit more difficult to use than other languages. Arbitrary effects can happen anywhere in Java or Python. Because of this, we don't have to worry about matching up effects with types.
But let's not forget about the benefits! For all parts of our code, we know what effects we can use. This lets us determine at compile time where certain problems can arise.
And type families give us the best of both worlds! They allow us to write polymorphic code that can work either with or without IO effects!
Conclusion
That's all for our series on Haskell's data system! We've now seen a wide range of elements, from the simple to the complex. We compared Haskell against other languages. Again, the simplicity with which one can declare data in Haskell and use it polymorphically was a key selling point for me!
Hopefully this series has inspired you to get started with Haskell if you haven't already! Download our Getting Started Checklist or read our Liftoff Series to get going!
Why Haskell IV: Typeclasses vs. Inheritance
Welcome to part four of our series comparing Haskell's data types to other languages. As I've expressed before, the type system is one of the key reasons I enjoy programming in Haskell. And this week, we're going to get to the heart of the matter. We'll compare Haskell's typeclass system with the idea of inheritance used by object oriented languages.
If Haskell's simplicity inspires you as well, try it out! Download our Beginners Checklist and read our Liftoff Series to get going!
Typeclasses Review
Before we get started, let's do a quick review of the concepts we're discussing. First, let's remember how typeclasses work. A typeclass describes a behavior we expect. Different types can choose to implement this behavior by creating an instance.
One of the most common classes is the Functor typeclass. The behavior of a functor is that it contains some data, and we can map a type transformation over that data.
In the raw code definition, a typeclass is a series of function names with type signatures. There's only one function for Functor: fmap:
class Functor f where
fmap :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f bA lot of different container types implement this typeclass. For example, lists implement it with the basic map function:
instance Functor [] where
fmap = mapBut now we can write a function that assumes nothing about one of its inputs except that it is a functor:
stringify :: (Functor f) -> f Int -> f StringWe could pass a list of ints, an IO action returning an Int, or a Maybe Int if we wanted. This function would still work! This is the core idea of how we can get polymorphic code in Haskell.
Inheritance Basics
As we saw in previous parts, object oriented languages like Java, C++, and Python tend to use inheritance to achieve polymorphism. With inheritance, we make a new class that extends the functionality of a parent class. The child class can access the fields and functions of the parent. We can call functions from the parent class on the child object. Here's an example:
public class Person {
public String firstName;
public String lastName;
public int age;
public Person(String fn, String ln, int age) {
this.firstName = fn;
this.lastName = ln;
this.age = age;
}
public String getFullName() {
return this.firstName + " " + this.lastName;
}
}
public class Employee extends Person {
public String company;
public String email;
public int salary;
public Employee(String fn,
String ln,
int age,
String company,
String em,
int sal) {
super(fn, ln, age);
this.company = company;
this.email = em;
this.sal = sal;
}
}Inheritance expresses an "Is-A" relationship. An Employee "is a" Person. Because of this, we can create an Employee, but pass it to any function that expects a Person. We can also call the getFullName function from Person on our Employee type.
public void printPerson(Person p) {
...
}
public void main {
Employee e = Employee("Michael", "Smith", 23, "Google", "msmith@google.com", 100000);
printPerson(e);
String s = e.getFullName();
}Here's another trick. We can put items constructed as either Person or Employee in the same array, if that array has type Person[]:
public void main {
Employee e = Employee("Michael", "Smith", 23, "Google", "msmith@google.com", 100000);
Person p = Person("Katie", "Johnson", 25);
Person[] people = {e, p};
}This provides a useful kind of polymorphism we can't get in Haskell.
Benefits
Inheritance does have a few benefits. It allows us to reuse code. The Employee class can use the getFullName function without having to define it. If we wanted, we could override the definition in the Employee class, but we don't have to.
Inheritance also allows a degree of polymorphism, as we saw in the code examples above. If the circumstances only require us to use a Person, we can use an Employee or any other subclass of Person we make.
We can also use inheritance to hide variables away when they aren't needed by subclasses. In our example above, we made all our instance variables public. This means an Employee function can still call this.firstName. But if we make them private instead, the subclasses can't use them in their functions. This helps to encapsulate our code.
Drawbacks
Inheritance is not without its downsides though. One unpleasant consequence is that it creates a tight coupling between classes. If we change the parent class, we run the risk of breaking all child classes. If the interface to the parent class changes, we'll have to change any subclass that overrides the function.
Another potential issue is that your interface could deform to accommodate child classes. There might be some parameters only a certain child class needs, and some only the parent needs. But you'll end up having all parameters in all versions because the API needs to match.
A final problem comes from trying to understand source code. There's a yo-yo effect that can happen when you need to hunt down what function definition your code is using. For example your child class can call a parent function. That parent function might call another function in its interface. But if the child has overridden it, you'd have to go back to the child. And this pattern can continue, making it difficult to keep track of what's happening. It gets even worse the more levels of a hierarchy you have.
I was a mobile developer for a couple years, using Java and Objective C. These kinds of flaws were part of what turned me off OO-focused languages.
Typeclasses as Inheritance
Now, Haskell doesn't allow you to "subclass" a type. But we can still get some of the same effects of inheritance by using typeclasses. Let's see how this works with the Person example from above. Instead of making a separate Person data type, we can make a Person typeclass. Here's one approach:
class Person a where
firstName :: a -> String
lastName :: a -> String
age :: a -> Int
getFullName :: a -> String
data Employee = Employee
{ employeeFirstName :: String
, employeeLastName :: String
, employeeAge :: Int
, company :: String
, email :: String
, salary :: Int
}
instance Person Employee where
firstName = employeeFirstName
lastName = employeeLastName
age = employeeAge
getFullName e = employeeFirstName e ++ " " ++ employeeLastName eWe can one interesting observation here. Multiple inheritance is now trivial. After all, a type can implement as many typeclasses as it wants. Python and C++ allows multiple inheritance. But it presents enough conceptual pains that languages like Java and Objective C do not allow it.
Looking at this example though, we can see a big drawback. We won't get much code reusability out of this. Every new type will have to define getFullName. That will get tedious. A different approach could be to only have the data fields in the interface. Then we could have a library function as a default implementation:
class Person a where
firstName :: a -> String
lastName :: a -> String
age :: a -> Int
getFullName :: (Person a) => a -> String
getFullName p = firstName p ++ " " ++ lastName p
data Employee = ...
instance Person Employee where
...This allows code reuse. But it does not allow overriding, which the first example would. So you'd have to choose on a one-off basis which approach made more sense for your type. And no matter what, we can't place different types into the same array, as we could in Java.
So while we could do inheritance in Haskell, it's a pattern you should avoid. Stick to using typeclasses in the intended way.
Comparisons
Object oriented inheritance has some interesting uses. But at the end of the day, I found the warts very annoying. Tight coupling between classes seems to defeat the purpose of abstraction. Meanwhile, restrictions like single inheritance feel like a code smell to me. The existence of that restriction suggests a design flaw. Finally, the issue of figuring out which version of a function you're using can be quite tricky. This is especially true when your class hierarchy is large.
Typeclasses express behaviors. And as long as our types implement those behaviors, we get access to a lot of useful code. It can be a little tedious to flesh out a new instance of a class for every type you make. But there are all kinds of ways to derive instances, and this can reduce the burden. I find typeclasses a great deal more intuitive and less restrictive. Whenever I see a requirement expressed through a typeclass, it feels clean and not clunky. This distinction is one of the big reasons I prefer Haskell over other languages.
Conclusion
That wraps up our comparison of typeclasses and inheritance! There's one more topic I'd like to cover in this series. It goes a bit beyond the "simplicity" of Haskell into some deeper ideas. We've seen concepts like parametric types and typeclasses. These force us to fill in "holes" in a type's definition. We can expand on this idea by looking at type families. Next week, we'll explore this more advanced concept and see what it's useful for.
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Why Haskell III: Parametric Types
Welcome back to our series on the simplicity of Haskell's data declarations. Last week, we looked at how to express sum types in different languages. We saw that they fit very well within Haskell's data declaration system. For Java and Python, we ended up using inheritance, which presents some interesting benefits and drawbacks. We'll explore those more next week. But first, we should wrap our heads around one more concept: parametric types.
We'll see how each of these languages allows for the concept of parametric types. In my view, Haskell does have the cleanest syntax. But other compiled languages do pretty well to incorporate the concept. Dynamica languages though, provide insufficient guarantees for my liking.
This all might seem a little wild if you haven't done any Haskell at all yet! Read our Liftoff Series to get started!
Haskell Parametric Types
Let's remember how easy it is to do parametric types in Haskell. When we want to parameterize a type, we'll add a type variable after its name in the definition. Then we can use this variable as we would any other type. Remember our Person type from the first week? Here's what it looks like if we parameterize the occupation field.
data Person o = Person
{ personFirstName :: String
, personLastName :: String
, personEmail :: String
, personAge :: Int
, personOccupation :: o
}We add the o at the start, and then we can use o in place of our former String type. Now whenever we use the Person type, we have to specify a type parameter to complete the definition.
data Occupation = Lawyer | Doctor | Engineer
person1 :: Person String
person1 = Person "Michael" "Smith" "msmith@gmail.com" 27 "Lawyer"
person2 :: Person Occupation
person2 = Person "Katie" "Johnson" "kjohnson@gmail.com" 26 DoctorWhen we define functions, we can use a specific version of our parameterized type if we want to constrain it. We can also use a generic type if it doesn't matter.
salesMessage :: Person Occupation -> String
salesMessage p = case personOccupation p of
Lawyer -> "We'll get you the settlement you deserve"
Doctor -> "We'll get you the care you need"
Engineer -> "We'll build that app for you"
fullName :: Person o -> String
fullName p = personFirstName p ++ " " ++ personLastName pLast of all, we can use a typeclass constraint on the parametric type if we only need certain behaviors:
sortOnOcc :: (Ord o) => [Person o] -> [Person o]
sortOnOcc = sortBy (\p1 p2 -> compare (personOccupation p1) (personOccupation p2)Java Generic Types
Java has a comparable concept called generics. The syntax for defining generic types is pretty clean. We define a type variable in brackets. Then we can use that variable as a type freely throughout the class definition.
public class Person<T> {
private String firstName;
private String lastName;
private String email;
private int age;
private T occupation;
public Person(String fn, String ln, String em, int age, T occ) {
this.firstName = fn;
this.lastName = ln;
this.email = em;
this.age = age;
this.occupation = occ;
}
public T getOccupation() { return this.occupation; }
public void setOccupation(T occ) { this.occupation = occ; }
...
}There's a bit of a wart in how we pass constraints. This comes from the Java distinction of interfaces from classes. Normally, when you define a class and state the subclass, you would use the extends keyword. But when your class uses an interface, you use the implements keyword.
But with generic type constraints, you only use extends. You can chain constraints together with &. But if one of the constraints is a subclass, it must come first.
public class Person<T extends Number & Comparable & Serializable> {In this example, our template type T must be a subclass of Number. It must then implement the Comparable and Serializable interfaces. If we mix the order up and put an interface before the parent class, it will not compile:
public class Person<T extends Comparable & Number & Serializable> {C++ Templates
For the first time in this series, we'll reference a little bit of C++ code. C++ has the idea of "template types" which are very much like Java's generics. Here's how we can create our user type as a template:
template <class T>
class Person {
public:
string firstName;
string lastName;
string email;
int age;
T occupation;
bool compareOccupation(const T& other);
};There's a bit more overhead with C++ though. C++ function implementations are typically defined outside the class definition. Because of this, you need an extra leading line for each of these stating that T is a template. This can get a bit tedious.
template <class T>
bool Person::compareOccupation(const T& other) {
...
}One more thing I'll note from my experience with C++ templates. The error messages from template types can be verbose and difficult to parse. For example, you could forget the template line above. This alone could cause a very confusing message. So there's definitely a learning curve. I've always found Haskell's error messages easier to deal with.
Python - The Wild West!
Since Python isn't compiled, there aren't type constraints when you construct an object. Thus, there is no need for type parameters. You can pass whatever object you want to a constructor. Take this example with our user and occupation:
class Person(object):
# This definition hasn't changed!
def __init__(self, fn, ln, em, age, occ):
self.firstName = fn
self.lastName = ln
self.email = em
self.age = age
self.occupation = occ
stringOcc = "Lawyer"
person1 = Person(
"Michael",
"Smith",
"msmith@gmail.com",
27,
stringOcc)
class Occupation(object):
…
classOcc = Occupation()
# Still works!
person2 = Person(
"Katie",
"Johnson",
"kjohnson@gmail.com",
26,
classOcc)Of course, with this flexibility comes great danger. If you expect there are different types you might pass for the occupation, your code must handle them all! Without compilation, it can be tricky to know you can do this. So while you can do polymorphic code in Python, you're more limited. You shouldn't get too carried away, because it is more likely to blow up in your face.
Conclusion
Now that we know about parametric types, we have more intuition for the idea of filling in type holes. This will come in handy next week as we look at Haskell's typeclass system for sharing behaviors. We'll compare the object oriented notion of inheritance and Haskell's typeclasses. This distinction gets to the core of why I've come to prefer Haskell as a language. You won't want to miss it!
If these comparisons have intrigued you, you should give Haskell a try! Download our Beginners Checklist to get started!
Why Haskell II: Sum Types
Today, I'm continuing our series on "Why Haskell". We're looking at concepts that are simple to express in Haskell but harder in other languages. Last week we began by looking at simple data declarations. This week, we'll go one step further and look at sum types. That is, we'll consider types with more than one constructor. These allow the same type to represent different kinds of data. They're invaluable in capturing many concepts.
Most of the material in this article is pretty basic. But if you haven't gotten the chance to use Haskell yet, you might to start from the beginning! Download our Beginners Checklist or read our Liftoff Series!
Haskell Basic Sum Types
Last week we started with a basic Person type like so:
data Person = Person String String String Int StringWe can expand this type by adding more constructors to it. Let's imagine our first constructor refers to an adult person. Then we could make a second constructor for a Child. It will have different information attached. For instance, we only care about their first name, age, and what grade they're in:
data Person =
Adult String String String Int String |
Child String Int IntTo determine what kind of Person we're dealing with, it's a simple case of pattern matching. So whenever we need to branch, we do this pattern match in a function definition or a case statement!
personAge :: Person -> Int
personAge (Adult _ _ _ a _) = a
personAge (Child _ a _) = a
-- OR
personAge :: Person -> Int
personAge p = case p of
Adult _ _ _ a _ -> a
Child _ a _ -> aOn the whole, our definition is very simple! And the approach scales. Adding a third or fourth constructor is just as simple! This extensibility is super attractive when designing types. The ease of this concept was a key point in convincing me about Haskell.
Record Syntax
Before we move onto other languages, it's worth noting the imperfections with this design. In our type above, it can be a bit confusing what each field represents. We used record syntax in the previous part to ease this pain. We can apply that again on this sum type:
data Person =
Adult
{ adultFirstName :: String
, adultLastName :: String
, adultEmail :: String
, adultAge :: Int
, adultOccupation :: String
} |
Child
{ childFirstName :: String
, childAge :: Int
, childGrade :: Int
}This works all right, but it still leaves us with some code smells we don't want in Haskell. In particular, record syntax derives functions for us. Here are a few type signatures of those functions:
adultEmail :: Person -> String
childAge :: Person -> Int
childGrade :: Person -> IntUnfortunately, these are partial functions. They are only defined for Person elements of the proper constructor. If we call adultEmail on a Child, we'll get an error, and we don't like that. The types appear to match up, but it will crash our program! We can work around this a little by merging field names like adultAge and childAge. But at the end of the day we'll still have some differences in what data we need.
Coding practices can reduce the burden somewhat. For example, it is quite safe to call head on a list if you've already pattern matched that it is non-empty. Likewise, we can use record syntax functions if we're in a "post-pattern-match" situation. But we would need to ignore them otherwise! And this is a rule we would like to avoid in Haskell.
Java Approach I: Multiple Constructors
Now let's try to replicate the idea of sum types in other languages. It's a little tricky. Here's a first approach we can do in Java. We could set a flag on our type indicating whether it's a Parent or a Child. Then we'll have all the different fields within our type. Note we'll use public fields without getters and setters for the sake of simplicity. Like Haskell, Java allows us to use two different constructors for our type:
public class Person {
public boolean isAdult;
public String adultFirstName;
public String adultLastName;
public String adultEmail;
public int adultAge;
public String adultOccupation;
public String childFirstName;
public int childAge;
public int childGrade;
// Adult Constructor
public Person(String fn, String ln, String em, int age, String occ) {
this.isAdult = true;
this.adultFirstName = fn;
...
}
// Child Constructor
public Person(String fn, int age, int grade) {
this.isAdult = false;
this.childFirstName = fn;
...
}
}We can see that there's a big amount of bloat on the field values, even if we were to combine common ones like age. Then we'll have more awkwardness when writing functions that have to pattern match. Each function within the type will involve a check on the boolean flag. And these checks might also percolate to outer calls as well.
public class Person {
…
public String getFullName() {
if (this.isAdult) {
// Adult Code
} else {
// Child Code
}
}
}This approach is harder to scale to more constructors. We would need an enumerated type rather than a boolean for the "flag" value. And it would add more conditions to each of our functions. This approach is cumbersome. It's also very unidiomatic Java code. The more "proper" way involves using inheritance.
Java Approach II: Inheritance
Inheritance is a way of sharing code between types in an object oriented language. For this example, we would make Person a "superclass" of separate Adult and Child classes. We would have separate class declarations for each of them. The Person class would share all the common information. Then the child classes would have code specific to them.
public class Person {
public String firstName;
public int age;
public Person(String fn, int age) {
this.firstName = fn;
this.age = age;
}
}
// NOTICE: extends Person
public class Adult extends Person {
public String lastName;
public String email;
public String occupation;
public Adult(String fn, String ln, String em, int age, String occ) {
// super calls the "Person" constructor
super(fn, age);
this.lastName = ln;
this.email = em;
this.occupation = occ;
}
}
// NOTICE: extends Person
public class Child extends Person {
public int grade;
public Child(String fn, int age, int grade) {
// super calls the "Person" constructor
super(fn, age);
this.grade = grade;
}
}By extending the Person type, each of our subclasses gets access to the firstName and age fields. There's a big upside we get here that Haskell doesn't usually have. In this case, we've encoded the constructor we used with the type. We'll be passing around Adult and Child objects for the most part. This saves a lot of the partial function problems we encounter in Haskell.
We will, on occasion, combine these in a form where we need to do pattern matching. For example, we can make an array of Person objects. Then at some point we'll need to determine which have type Adult and which have type Child. This is possible by using the isinstance condition in Java. But again, it's unidiomatic and we should strive to avoid it. Still, inheritance represents a big improvement over our first approach.
Python: Only One Constructor!
Unlike Java, Python only allows a single constructor for each type. The way we would control what "type" we make is by passing a certain set of arguments. We then provide None default values for the rest. Here's what it might look like.
class Person(object):
def __init__(self,
fn = None,
ln = None,
em = None,
age = None,
occ = None,
grade = None):
if fn and ln and em and age and occ:
self.isAdult = true
self.firstName = fn
self.lastName = ln
self.age = age
self.occupation = occ
self.grade = None
elif fn and age and grade:
self.isAdult = false
self.firstName = fn
self.age = age
self.grade = grade
self.lastName = None
self.email = None
self.occupation = None
else:
raise ValueError("Failed to construct a Person!")
# Note which arguments we use!
adult = Person(fn="Michael", ln="Smith", em="msmith@gmail.com", age=25, occ="Lawyer")
child = Person(fn="Mike", age=12, grade=7)But there's a lot of messiness here! A lot of input combinations lead to errors! Because of this, the inheritance approach we proposed for Java is also the best way to go for Python. Again though, Python lacks pattern matching across different types of classes. This means we'll have more if statements like if isinstance(x, Adult). In fact, these will be even more prevalent in Python, as type information isn't attached.
Comparisons
Once again, we see certain themes arising. Haskell has a clean, simple syntax for this concept. It isn't without its difficulties, but it gets the job done if we're careful. Java gives us a couple ways to manage the issue of sum types. One is cumbersome and unidiomatic. The other is more idiomatic, but presents other issues as we'll see later. Then Python gives us a great deal of flexibility but few guarantees about anything's type. The result is that we can get a lot of errors.
Conclusion
This week, we continued our look at the simplicity of constructing types in Haskell. We saw how a first try at replicating the concept of sum types in other languages leads to awkward code. In a couple weeks, we'll dig deeper into the concept of inheritance. It offers a decent way to accomplish our task in Java and Python. And yet, there's a reason we don't have it in Haskell. But first up, our next article will look at the idea of parametric types. We'll see again that it is simpler to do this in Haskell's syntax than other languages. We'll need those ideas to help us explore inheritance later.
If this series makes you want to try Haskell more, it's time to get going! Download our Beginner's Checklist for some tips and tools on starting out! Or read our Liftoff Series for a more in depth look at Haskell basics.
Why Haskell I: Simple Data Types!
I first learned about Haskell in college. I've considered why I kept up with Haskell after, even when I didn't know about its uses in industry. I realized there were a few key elements that drew me to it.
In a word, Haskell is elegant. For me, this means we can simple concepts in simple terms. In the next few weeks, we're going to look at some of these concepts. We'll see that Haskell expresses a lot of ideas in simple terms that other languages express in more complicated terms. This week, we'll start by looking at simple data declarations.
If you've never used Haskell, now is the perfect time to start! For a quick start guide, download our Beginners Checklist. For a more in-depth walkthrough, read our Liftoff Series!
Haskell Data Declarations
This week, we'll be comparing a data type with a single constructor across a few different languages. Next week, we'll look at multi-constructor types. So let's examine a simple type declaration:
data Person = Person String String String Int StringOur declaration is very simple, and fits on one line. There's a single constructor with a few different fields attached to it. We know exactly what the types of those fields are, so we can build the object. The only way we can declare a Person is to provide all the right information in order.
firstPerson :: Person
firstPerson = Person "Michael" "Smith" "msmith@gmail.com" 32 "Lawyer"If we provide any less information, we won't have a Person! We can leave off the last argument. But then the resulting type reflects that we still need that field to complete our item:
incomplete :: String -> Person
incomplete = Person "Michael" "Smith" "msmith@gmail.com" 32Now, our type declaration is admittedly confusing. We don't know what each field means at all when looking at it. And it would be easy to mix things up. But we can fix that in Haskell with record syntax, which assigns a name to each field.
data Person = Person
{ personFirstName :: String
, personLastName :: String
, personEmail :: String
, personAge :: Int
, personOccupation :: String
}We can use these names as functions to retrieve the specific fields out of the data item later.
fullName :: Person -> String
fullName person = personFirstName person ++ " "
++ personLastName personAnd that's the basics of data types in Haskell! Let's take a look at this same type declaration in a couple other languages.
Java
If we wanted to express this in the simplest possible Java form, we'd do so like this:
public class Person {
public String firstName;
public String lastName;
public String email;
public int age;
public String occupation;
}Now, this definition isn't much longer than the Haskell definition. It isn't a very useful definition as written though! We can only initialize it with a default constructor Person(). And then we have to assign all the fields ourselves! So let's fix this with a constructor:
public class Person {
public String firstName;
public String lastName;
public String email;
public int age;
public String occupation;
public Person(String fn,
String ln,
String em,
int age,
String occ) {
this.firstName = fn;
this.lastName = ln;
this.email = em;
this.age = age;
this.occupation = occ;
}
}Now we can initialize it in a sensible way. But this still isn't idiomatic Java. Normally, we would have our instance variables declared as private, not public. Then we would expose the ones we wanted via "getter" and "setter" methods. If we do this for all our types, it would bloat the class quite a bit. In general though, you wouldn't have arbitrary setters for all your fields. Here's our code with getters and one setter.
public class Person {
private String firstName;
private String lastName;
private String email;
private int age;
private String occupation;
public Person(String fn,
String ln,
String em,
int age,
String occ) {
this.firstName = fn;
this.lastName = ln;
this.email = em;
this.age = age;
this.occupation = occ;
}
public String getFirstName() { return this.firstName; }
public String getLastName() { return this.lastName; }
public String getEmail() { return this.email; }
public int getAge() { return this.age; }
public String getOccupation() { return this.occupation; }
public void setOccupation(String occ) { this.occupation = occ; }
}Now we've got code that is both complete and idiomatic Java.
Public and Private
We can see that the lack of a public/private distinction in Haskell saves us a lot of grief in defining our types. Why don't we do this?
In general, we'll declare our data types so that constructors and fields are all visible. After all, data objects should contain data. And this data is usually only useful if we expose it to the outside world. But remember, it's only exposed as read-only, because our objects are immutable! We'd have to construct another object if we want to "mutate" an existing item (IO monad aside).
The other thing to note is we don't consider functions as a part of our data type in the same way Java (or C++) does. A function is a function whether we define it along with our type or not. So we separate them syntactically from our type, which also contributes to conciseness.
Of course, we do have some notion of public and private items in Haskell. Instead of using the type defintion, we handle it with our module definitins. For instance, we might abstract constructors behind other functions. This allows extra features like validation checks. Here's how we can define our person type but hide it's true constructor:
module Person (Person, mkPerson) where
-- We do NOT export the `Person` constructor!
--
-- To do that, we would use:
-- module Person (Person(Person)) where
-- OR
-- module Person (Person(..)) where
data Person = Person String String String Int String
mkPerson :: String -> String -> String -> Int -> String
-> Either String Person
mkPerson = ...Now anyone who uses our code has to use the mkPerson function. This lets us return an error if something is wrong!
Python
As our last example in this article, here's a simple Python version of our data type.
class Person(object):
def __init__(self, fn, ln, em, age, occ):
self.firstName = fn
self.lastName = ln
self.email = em
self.age = age
self.occupation = occThis definition is pretty compact. We can add functions to this class, or define them outside and pass the class as another variable. It's not as clean as Haskell, but much shorter than Java.
Now, Python has no notion of private member variables. Conventions exist, like using an underscore in front of "private" variable names. But you can't restrict their usage outside of your file, even through imports! This helps keep the type definition smaller. But it does make Python a little less flexible than other languages.
What Python does have is more flexibility in argument ordering. We can name our arugments as follows, allowing us to change the order we use to initialize our type. Then we can include default arguments (like None).
class Person(object):
def __init__(self, fn=None, ln=None, em=None, age=None, occ=None):
self.firstName = fn
self.lastName = ln
self.email = em
self.age = age
self.occupation = occ
# This person won't have a first name!
myPerson = Person(
ln="Smith",
age=25,
em="msmith@gmail.com",
occ="Lawyer")This gives more flexibility. We can initialize our object in a lot more different ways. But it's also a bit dangerous. Now we don't necessarily know what fields are null when using our object. This can cause a lot of problems later. We'll explore this theme throughout this series when looking at Python data types and code.
Javascript
We'll be making more references to Python throughout this series as we explore its syntax. Most of the observations we make about Python apply equally well to Javascript. In general, Javascript offers us flexibility in constructing objects. For instance, we can even extend objects with new fields once they're created. Javascript even naturalizes the concept of extending objects with functions. (This is possible in Python, but not as idiomatic).
A result of this though is that we have no guarantees about how which of our objects have which fields. We won't know for sure we'll get a good value from calling any given property. Even basic computations in Javascript can give results like NaN or undefined. In Haskell you can end up with undefined, but pretty much only if you assign that value yourself! And in Haskell, we're likely to see an immediate termination of the program if that happens. Javascript might percolate these bad values far up the stack. These can lead to strange computations elsewhere that don't crash our program but give weird output instead!
But the specifics of Javascript can change a lot with the framework you happen to be using. So we won't cite too many code examples in this series. Remember though, most of the observations we make with Python will apply.
Conclusion
So after comparing these methods, I much prefer using Haskell's way of defining data. It's clean, and quick. We can associate functions with our type or not, and we can make fields private if we want. And that's just in the one-constructor case! We'll see how things get even more hairy for other languages when we add more constructors! Come back next week to see how things stack up!
If you've never programmed in Haskell, hopefully this series shows you why it's actually not too hard! Read our Liftoff Series or download our Beginners Checklist to get started!
Happy New Years from MMH!
As 2018 comes to a close, I’d like to personally wish all my readers a happy new year! It’s been a big year for Monday Morning Haskell. We’re now more than two years old. We’ve grown a lot in readership, and tackled some very complex topics. We also released the first iteration of our Beginner’s Course, which will soon be re-opened!
New years is a time when I always like to get back to the basics a little bit. So for January, I’ve got a special series focusing on the simple things that drew me to Haskell in the first place. Haskell is a very different language from most. It has a lot of tools to express simple concepts that other languages struggle with.
We’ll look at things like type declarations, parametric types, and type families. We’ll compare the code required to express these concepts in Haskell and other languages. We’ll see the costs and benefits, and how Haskell gives us a lot more guarantees about how our code will work.
Besides our weekly blog posts, we've got some other big plans for 2019. We’re also looking to add another full-length course to our collection this summer! It will target a lot of the more advanced concepts we’ve gone through in this blog. You won’t want to miss it, so stay tuned!
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Purescript Series Now Available!
Last week we wrapped up our series on Purescript. At some point, we’ll come back to frontend web and tackle it from a more Haskell-centric perspective. But for now, we’ve added our our Purescript series as another permanent feature on our advanced page. You can take a look at that as well as our series on Elm. As a reminder, here’s the structure of that series:
- Part 1 covers the basics of Purescript. We see how to install it and how to solve simple problems.
- In part 2, we dig into some of the more complicated aspects of Purescript. We compare it to Haskell when it comes to elements like monads and typeclasses.
- In part 3, we get into the actual web usage of Purescript. We explore the basics of constructing a UI with the Halogen library. We also see how to architect our application to pass information around.
- We wrap up the series in part 4. In this part, we learn how to send web requests from our application. We also look at how to use routes to navigate between different pages.
Remember we also have plenty of resources for writing backend Haskell code! You can read our Haskell Web Series for some in-depth tutorials. You can also check out our Production Checklist for a slew of libraries for many different tasks!
And for any beginners out there, we have lots of material for you as well! Read our Liftoff Series and download our Beginners Checklist. They’ll teach you the basics of Haskell from the ground up!
Purescript IV: Routing and Navigation!
Welcome to the conclusion of our series on Purescript! We've spent a lot of time now learning to use functional languages for frontend web. Last Week we saw how to build a basic UI with Purescript. We made a simple counter and then a todo list application, as we did with Elm. This week, we'll explore two more crucial pieces of functionality. We'll see how to send web requests and how to provide different routes for our application.
There are two resources you can look at if you want more details on how this code works. First, you can look at our Github repository. You can also explore the Halogen Github repository. Take a look at the driver-routing and effects-ajax example.
Web Requests
For almost any web application, you're going to need to retrieve some data from a backend server. We'll use the purescript-affjax library to make requests from our Halogen components. The process is going to be a little simpler than it was with Elm.
In Elm, we had to hook web requests into our architecture using the concept of commands. But Purescript's syntax uses monads by nature. This makes it easier to work effects into our eval function.
In this first part of the article, we're going to build a simple web UI that will be able to send a couple requests. As with all our Halogen components, let's start by defining our state, message, and query types:
type State =
{ getResponse :: String
, postInfo :: String
}
initialState :: State
initialState =
{ getResponse: "Nothing Yet"
, postInfo: ""
}
data Query a =
SendGet a |
SendPost a |
UpdatedPostInfo String a
data Message = ReceivedFromPost StringWe'll store two pieces of information in the state. First, we'll store a "response" we get from calling a get request, which we'll initialize to a default string. Then we'll store a string that the user will enter in a text field. We'll send this string through a post request. We'll make query constructors for each of the requests we'll send. Then, our message type will allow us to update our application with the result of the post request.
We'll initialize our component as we usually do, except with one difference. In previous situations, we used an unnamed m monad for our component stack. This time, we'll specify the Aff monad, enabling our asynchronous messages. This monad also gets applied to our eval function.
webSender :: H.Component HH.HTML Query Unit Message Aff
webSender = H.component
{ initialState: const initialState
, render
, eval
, receiver: const Nothing
}
render :: State -> H.ComponentHTML Query
…
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message Aff
…Our UI will have four elements. We'll have a p field storing the response from our get request, as well as a button for triggering that request. Then we'll have an input field where the user can enter a string. There will also be a button to send that string in a post request. These all follow the patterns we saw in part 3 of this series, so we won't dwell on the specifics:
render :: State -> H.ComponentHTML Query
render st = HH.div [] [progressText, getButton, inputText, postButton]
where
progressText = HH.p [] [HH.text st.getResponse]
getButton = HH.button
[ HP.title "Send Get", HE.onClick (HE.input_ SendGet) ]
[ HH.text "Send Get" ]
inputText = HH.input
[ HP.type_ HP.InputText
, HP.placeholder "Form Data"
, HP.value st.postInfo
, HE.onValueChange (HE.input UpdatedPostInfo)
]
postButton = HH.button
[ HP.title "Send Post", HE.onClick (HE.input_ SendPost) ]
[ HH.text "Send Post" ]Our eval function will assess each of the different queries we can receive, as always. When updating the post request info (the text field), we update our state with the new value.
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message Aff
eval = case _ of
SendGet next -> ...
SendPost next -> ...
UpdatedPostInfo newInfo next -> do
st <- H.get
H.put (st { postInfo = newInfo })
pure nextNow let's specify our get request. The get function from the Affjax library takes two parameters. First we need a "deserializer", which tells us how to convert the response into some desired type. We'll imagine we're getting a String back from the server, so we'll use the string deserializer. The our second parameter is the URL. This will be a localhost address. We call liftAff to get this Aff call into our component monad.
import Affjax as AX
import Affjax.ResponseFormat as AXR
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message Aff
eval = case _ of
SendGet next -> do
response <- H.liftAff $ AX.get AXR.string "http://localhost:8081/api/hello"
...
SendPost next -> ...
UpdatedPostInfo newInfo next -> ...The response contains a lot of information, including things like the status code. But our main concern is the response body. This is an Either value giving us a success or error value. In either case, we'll put a reasonable value into our state, and call the next action!
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message Aff
eval = case _ of
SendGet next -> do
response <- H.liftAff $ AX.get AXR.string "http://localhost:8081/api/hello"
st <- H.get
case response.body of
Right success -> H.put (st { getResponse = success })
Left _ -> H.put (st { getResponse = "Error!" })
pure next
SendPost next -> ...
UpdatedPostInfo newInfo next -> ...Then we can go to our UI, click the button, and it will update the field with an appropriate value!
Post Requests
Sending a post request will be similar. The main change is that we'll need to create a body for our post request. We'll do this using the "Argonaut" library for Purescript. The fromString function gives us a JSON object. We wrap this into a RequestBody with the json function:
import Affjax.RequestBody as AXRB
import Data.Argonaut.Core as JSON
…
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message Aff
eval = case _ of
SendGet next -> ...
SendPost next -> do
st <- H.get
let body = AXRB.json (JSON.fromString st.postInfo)
...
UpdatedPostInfo newInfo next -> ...Aside from adding this body parameter, the post function works as the get function does. We'll break the response body into Right and Left cases to determine the result. Instead of updating our state, we'll send a message about the result.
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message Aff
eval = case _ of
SendGet next -> ...
SendPost next -> do
st <- H.get
let body = AXRB.json (JSON.fromString st.postInfo)
response <- H.liftAff $ AX.post AXR.string "http://localhost:8081/api/post" body
case response.body of
Right success -> H.raise (ReceivedFromPost success)
Left _ -> H.raise (ReceivedFromPost "There was an error!")
pure next
UpdatedPostInfo newInfo next -> ...And that's the basics of web requests!
Routing Basics
Now let's change gears and consider how we can navigate among different pages. For the sake of example, let's say we've got 4 different types of pages in our app.
- A home page
- A login page
- A user profile page
- A page for each article
Each user profile will have an integer user ID attached to it. Each article will have a string identifier attached to it as well as a user ID for the author. Here's a traditional router representation of this:
/home
/login
/profile/:userid
/blog/articles/:userid/:articleidWith the Purescript Routing library, our first step is to represent our set of routes with a data type. Each route will represent a page on our site, so we'll call our type Page. Here's how we do that:
data Page =
HomePage |
LoginPage |
ProfilePage Int |
ArticlePage Int StringBy using a data structure, we'll be able to ensure two things. First, all the routes in our application have some means of handling them. If we're missing a case, the compiler will let us know. Second, we'll ensure that our application logic cannot route the user to an unknown page. We will need to use one of the routes within our data structure.
Building a Parser
That said, the user could still enter any URL they want in the address bar. So we have to know how to parse URLs into our different pages. For this, we have to build a parser on our route type. This will have the type Match Page. This will follow an applicative parsing structure. For more background on this, check out this article from our parsing series!
But even if you've never seen this kind of parsing before, the patterns aren't too hard. The first thing to know is that the lit function (meaning literal) matches a string path component. So we feed it the string element we want, and it will match our route.
For our home page route, we'll want to first match the URL component "home".
import Routing.Match (Match, lit, int, str)
matchHome = lit "home"But this will actually give us a Match that outputs a String. We want to ignore the string we parsed, and give a constructor of our Page type. Here's what that looks like:
matchHome :: Match Page
matchHome = HomePage <$ lit "home"The <$ data-preserve-html-node="true" operator tells us we want to perform a functor wrap. Except we want to ignore the resulting value from the second part. This gives our first match!
The login page will have a very similar matcher:
matchLogin :: Match Page
matchLogin = LoginPage <$ lit "login"But then for the profile page, we'll actually want to use the result from one of our matchers! We want to use int to read the integer out of the URL component and plug it into our data structure. For this, we need the applicative operator <*>. Except once again, we'll have a string part that we ignore, so we'll actually use *>. Here's what it looks like:
matchProfile :: Match Page
matchProfile = ProfilePage <$> (lit "profile" *> int)Now for our final matcher, we'll keep using these same ideas! We'll use the full applicative operator <*> since we want both the user ID and the article ID.
matchArticle :: Match Page
matchArticle = ArticlePage <$>
(lit "blog" *> lit "articles" *> int) <*> stringNow we combine our different matchers into a router by using the <|> operator from Alternative:
router :: Match Page
router = matchHome <|> matchLogin <|> matchProfile <|> matchArticleAnd we're done! Notice how similar Purescript and Haskell are in this situation! Pretty much all the code from this section could work in Haskell. (As long as we used the corresponding libraries).
Incorporating Our Router
Now to use this routing mechanism, we're going to need to set up our application in a special way. It will have one single parent component and several child components. We will make it so that our application can listen to changes in the URL. We'll use our router to match those changes to our URL scheme. Our parent component will, as always, respond to queries.
We won't go through the details of our child components. You can take a look at src/NavComponents.purs in our Github repo for details there.
We'll use some special mechanisms to send a query on each route change event. Then our parent component will handle updating the view. An important thing to know is that all the child components have the same query and message type. We won't use these much in this article, but these are how you would customize app-wide behavior.
type ChildState = Int
data ChildQuery a = ChildQuery a
data ChildMessage = ChildMessageEach child component will have a link to the "next page" in the sequence. This way, we can show how these links work once we render it. We'll need access to these component definitions in our parent module:
homeComponent :: forall m.
H.Component HH.HTML ChildQuery Unit ChildMessage m
loginComponent :: forall m.
H.Component HH.HTML ChildQuery Unit ChildMessage m
profileComponent :: forall m. Int ->
H.Component HH.HTML ChildQuery Unit ChildMessage m
articleComponent :: forall m. Int -> String ->
H.Component HH.HTML ChildQuery Unit ChildMessage mThe Parent Component
Now let's start our by making a simple query type for our parent element. We'll have one query for changing the page, and one for processing messages from our children.
data ParentQuery a =
ChangePage Page a |
HandleAppAction Message aThe parent's state will include the current page. It could also include some secondary elements like the ID of the logged in user, if we wanted.
type ParentState = { currentPage :: Page }Now we'll need slot designations for the "child" element of our page. Depending on the state of our application, our child element will be a different component. This is how we'll represent the different pages of our application.
data SlotId = HomeSlot | LoginSlot | ProfileSlot | ArticleSlotOur eval and render functions should be pretty straightforward. When we evaluate the "change page" query, we'll update our state. Then we won't do anything when processing a ChildMessage:
eval :: forall m. ParentQuery ~>
H.ParentDSL ParentState ParentQuery ChildQuery SlotId Void m
eval = case _ of
ChangePage pg next -> do
H.put {currentPage: pg}
pure next
HandleAppAction _ next -> do
pure nextFor our render function, we first need a couple helpers. The first goes from the page to the slot ID. The second gives a mapping from our page data structure to the proper component.
slotForPage :: Page -> SlotId
slotForPage HomePage = HomeSlot
slotForPage LoginPage = LoginSlot
slotForPage (ProfilePage _) = ProfileSlot
slotForPage (ArticlePage _ _) = ArticleSlot
componentForPage :: forall m. Page ->
H.Component HH.HTML ChildQuery Unit Message m
componentForPage HomePage = homeComponent
componentForPage LoginPage = loginComponent
componentForPage (ProfilePage uid) = profileComponent uid
componentForPage (ArticlePage uid aid) = articleComponent uid aidNow we can construct our render function. We'll access the page from our state, and then create an appropriate slot for it:
render :: forall m. ParentState ->
H.ParentHTML ParentQuery ChildQuery SlotId m
render st = HH.div_
[ HH.slot sl comp unit (HE.input HandleAppAction)
]
where
sl = slotForPage st.currentPage
comp = componentForPage st.currentPageAdding Routing
Now to actually apply the routing in our application, we'll update our Main module. This process will be a little complicated. There are a lot of different libraries involved in reading event changes. We won't dwell too much on the details, but here's the high level overview.
Every time the user changes the URL or clicks a link, this produces a HashChangeEvent. We want to create our own Producer that will listen for these events so we can send them to our application. Here's what that looks like:
import Control.Coroutine as CR
import Control.Coroutine.Aff as CRA
import Web.HTML (window) as DOM
import Web.HTML.Event.HashChangeEvent as HCE
import Web.HTML.Event.HashChangeEvent.EventTypes as HCET
hashChangeProducer :: CR.Producer HCE.HashChangeEvent Aff Unit
hashChangeProducer = CRA.produce \emitter -> do
listener <- DOM.eventListener
(traverse_ (CRA.emit emitter) <<< HCE.fromEvent)
liftEffect $
DOM.window
>>= Window.toEventTarget
>>> DOM.addEventListener HCET.hashchange listener falseNow we want our application to consume these events. So we'll set up a Consumer function. It consumes the hash change events and passes them to our UI, as we'll see:
hashChangeConsumer
:: (forall a. ParentQuery a -> Aff a)
-> CR.Consumer HCE.HashChangeEvent Aff Unit
hashChangeConsumer query = CR.consumer \event -> do
let hash = Str.drop 1 $ Str.dropWhile (_ /= '#') $ HCE.newURL event
result = match router hash
newPage = case result of
Left _ -> HomePage
Right page -> page
void $ liftAff $ query $ H.action (ChangePage newPage)
pure NothingThere are a couple things to notice. We drop the hash up until the # to get the relevant part of our URL. Then we pass it to our router for processing. Finally, we pass an appropriate ChangePage action to our UI.
How do we do this? Well, the first argument of this consumer function (query) is actually another function. This function takes in our ParentQuery and produces an Aff event. We can access this function as a result of the runUI function.
So our final step is to run our UI. Then we run a separate process that will chain the producer and consumer together:
main :: Effect Unit
main = HA.runHalogenAff do
body <- HA.awaitBody
io <- runUI parentComponent unit body
CR.runProcess (hashChangeProducer CR.$$ hashChangeConsumer io.query)We pass the io.query property of our application UI to the consumer, so our UI can react to the events. And now our application will respond to URL changes!
Conclusion
This wraps up our series on Purescript! Between this and our Elm Series , you should have a good idea on how to use functional languages to write a web UI. As a reminder, you can see more details on running Purescript code on our Github Repository. The README will walk you through the basic steps of getting this code setup.
You can also take a look at some of our other resources on web development using Haskell! Read our Haskell Web Series to see how to write a backend for your application. You can also download our Production Checklist to learn about more libraries you can use.
Purescript III: Making a Web Page with Purescript and React!
Last week we continued learning the basic elements of Purescript. We examined how typeclasses and monads work and the slight differences from Haskell. Now it's finally time to use Purescript for its main purpose: frontend web development. We'll accomplish this using the Halogen framework, built on React.js.
In this article, we'll learn about the basic concepts of Halogen/React. We'll build a couple simple components to show how these work. Next week, we'll conclude our look at Purescript by making a more complete application. We'll see how to handle routing and sending web requests.
If you're building a frontend, you'll also need a backend at some point. Check out our Haskell Web Series to learn how to do that in Haskell!
Also, getting Purescript to work can be tricky business! Take a look at our Github repository for some more setup instructions!
Halogen Crash Course
The Halogen framework uses React.js under the hood, and the code applies similar ideas. If you don't do a lot of web development, you might not be too familiar with the details of React. Luckily, there are a few simple principles we'll apply that will remind us of Elm!
With Halogen, our UI consists of different "components". A component is a UI element that maintains its own state and properties. It also responds to queries, and sends messages. For any component, we'll start by defining a a state type, a query type, and a message type.
data CState = …
data CQuery = …
data CMessage = ...Our component receives queries from within itself or from other components. It can then send messages to other components, provided they have queries to handle them. With these types in place, we'll use the component function to define a component with 3 main elements. As a note, we'll be maintaining these import prefixes throughout the article.
import Halogen as H
import Halogen.HTML as HH
import Halogen.Events as HE
import Halogen.Properties as HP
myComponent :: forall m.
H.Component HH.HTML CQuery Unit CMessage m
myComponent = H.component
{ initialState: …
, render: …
, eval: …
, receiver: const Nothing
}
where
render ::
CState ->
H.ComponentHTML CQuery
eval ::
CQuery ~>
H.ComponentDSL CState CQuery CMessage mThe initialState is self explanatory. The render function will be a lot like our view function from Elm. It takes a state and returns HTML components that can send queries. The eval function acts like our update function in Elm. Its type signature looks a little strange. But it takes queries as inputs and can update our state using State monad function. It can also emit messages to send to other components.
Building a Counter
For our first example of a component, we'll make a simple counter. We'll have an increment button, a decrement button and a display of the current count. Our state will be a simple integer. Our queries will involve events from incrementing and decrementing. We'll also send a message each time we update our number.
type State = Int
data Query a =
Increment a |
Decrement a
data Message = Updated IntNotice we have an extra parameter on our query type. This represents the "next" action that will happen in our UI. We'll see how this works when we write our eval function. But first, let's write out our render function. It has three different HTML elements: two buttons and a p label. We'll stick them in a div element.
render :: State -> H.ComponentHTML Query
render state =
let incButton = HH.button
[ HP.title "Inc"
, HE.onClick (HE.input_ Increment)
]
[ HH.text "Inc" ]
decButton = HH.button
[ HP.title "Dec"
, HE.onClick (HE.input_ Decrement)
]
[ HH.text "Dec" ]
pElement = HH.p [] [HH.text (show state)]
in HH.div [] [incButton, decButton, pElement]Each of our elements takes two list parameters. The first list includes properties as well as event handlers. Notice our buttons send query messages on their click events using the input_ function. Then the second list is "child" HTML elements, including the inner text of a button.
Now, to write our eval function, we use a case statement. This might seem a little weird, but all we're doing is breaking it down into our query cases:
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message m
eval = case _ of
Increment next -> ...
Decrement next -> ...Within each case, we can use State monad-like functions to manipulate our state. Our cases are identical except for the sign. We'll also use the raise function to send an update message. Nothing listens for that message right now, but it illustrates the concept.
eval :: Query ~> H.ComponentDSL State Query Message m
eval = case _ of
Increment next -> do
state <- H.get
let nextState = state + 1
H.put nextState
H.raise $ Updated nextState
pure next
Decrement next -> do
state <- H.get
let nextState = state - 1
H.put nextState
H.raise $ Updated nextState
pure nextAs a last note, we would use const 0 as the initialState in our component function.
Installing Our Component
Now to display this component in our UI, we write a short Main module like so. We get our body element with awaitBody and then use runUI to install our counter component.
module Main where
import Prelude
import Effect (Effect)
import Halogen.Aff as HA
import Halogen.VDom.Driver (runUI)
import Counter (counter)
main :: Effect Unit
main = HA.runHalogenAff do
body <- HA.awaitBody
runUI counter unit bodyAnd our counter component will now work! (See Github for more details on you could run this code).
Building Our Todo List
Now that we've got the basics down, let's see how to write a more complicated set of components. We'll write a Todo list like we had in the Elm series. To start, let's make a Todo wrapper type and derive some instances for it:
newtype Todo = Todo
{ todoName :: String }
derive instance eqTodo :: Eq Todo
derive instance ordTodo :: Ord TodoOur first component will be the entry form, where the user can add a new task. This form will use the text input string as its state. It will respond to queries for updating the name as well as pressing the "Add" button. When we create a new Todo, we'll send a message for that.
type AddTodoFormState = String
data AddTodoFormMessage = NewTodo Todo
data AddTodoFormQuery a =
AddedTodo a |
UpdatedName String aWhen we render this component, we'll have two main pieces. First, we need the text field to input the name. Then, there's the button to add the task. Each of these has an event attached to it sending the relevant query. In the case of updating the name, notice we use input instead of input_. This allows us to send the text field's value as an argument of the UpdatedName query. Otherwise, the properties are pretty straightforward translations of HTML properties you might see.
render ::
AddTodoFormState ->
H.ComponentHTML AddTodoFormQuery
render currentName =
let nameInput = HH.input
[ HP.type_ HP.InputText
, HP.placeholder "Task Name"
, HP.value currentName
, HE.onValueChange (HE.input UpdatedName)
]
addButton = HH.button
[ HP.title "Add Task"
, HP.disabled (length currentName == 0)
, HE.onClick (HE.input_ AddedTodo)
]
[ HH.text "Add Task" ]
in HH.div [] [nameInput, addButton]Evaluating our queries is pretty simple. When updating the name, all we do is update the state and trigger the next action. When we add a new Todo item, we save the empty string as the state and raise our message. In the next part, we'll see how our list will respond to this message.
eval ::
AddTodoFormQuery ~>
H.ComponentDSL
AddTodoFormState AddTodoFormQuery AddTodoFormMessage m
eval = case _ of
AddedTodo next -> do
currentName <- H.get
H.put ""
H.raise $ NewTodo (Todo {todoName: currentName})
pure next
UpdatedName newName next -> do
H.put newName
pure nextAnd of course, we tie this all up by using the component function:
addTodoForm :: forall m.
H.Component HH.HTML AddTodoFormQuery Unit AddTodoFormMessage m
addTodoForm = H.component
{ initialState: const ""
, render
, eval
, receiver: const Nothing
}Finishing the List
Now to complete our todo list, we'll need another component to store the tasks themselves. As always, let's start with our basic types. We won't bother with a message type since this component won't send any messages. We'll use Void when assigning the message type in a type signature:
type TodoListState = Array Todo
data TodoListQuery a =
FinishedTodo Todo a |
HandleNewTask AddTodoFormMessage aOur state is our list of tasks. Our query type is a little more complicated. The HandleNewTask query will receive the new task messages from our form. We'll see how we make this connection below.
We'll also add a type alias for AddTodoFormSlot. Halogen uses a "slot ID" to distinguish between child elements. We only have one child element though, so we'll use a string.
type AddTodoFormSlot = StringWe'll consider this component a "parent" of our "add task" form. This means the types will look a little different. We'll be making something of type ParentHTML. The type signature will include references to its own query type, the query type of its child, and the slot ID type. We'll still use most of the same functions though.
render ::
TodoListState ->
H.ParentHTML TodoListQuery AddTodoFormQuery AddTodoFormSlot m
eval ::
TodoListQuery ~>
H.ParentDSL TodoListState TodoListQuery AddTodoFormQuery
AddTodoFormSlot Void mTo render our elements, we'll have two sub-components. First, we'll want to be able to render an individual Todo within our list. We'll give it a p label for the name and a button that completes the task:
renderTask ::
Todo ->
H.ParentHTML TodoListQuery AddTodoFormQuery AddTodoFormSlot m
renderTask (Todo t) = HH.div_
[ HH.p [] [HH.text t.todoName]
, HH.button
[ HE.onClick (HE.input_ (FinishedTodo (Todo t)))]
[HH.text "Finish"]
]Now we need some HTML for the form slot itself. This is straightforward. We'll use the slot function and provide a string for the ID. We'll specify the component we have from the last part. Then we'll attach the HandleNewTask query to this component. The allows our list component to receive the new-task messages from the form.
formSlot ::
H.ParentHTML TodoListQuery AddTodoFormQuery AddTodoFormSlot m
formSlot = HH.slot
"Add Todo Form"
addTodoForm
unit
(HE.input HandleNewTask)Now we combine these elements in our render function:
render ::
TodoListState ->
H.ParentHTML TodoListQuery AddTodoFormQuery AddTodoFormSlot m
render todos =
let taskList = HH.ul_ (map renderTask todos)
in HH.div_ [taskList, formSlot]Writing our eval is now a simple matter of using a few array functions to update the list. When we get a new task, we add it to our list. When we finish a task, we remove it from the list.
eval ::
TodoListQuery ~>
H.ParentDSL TodoListState TodoListQuery AddTodoFormQuery
AddTodoFormSlot Void m
eval = case _ of
FinishedTodo todo next -> do
currentTasks <- H.get
H.put (filter (_ /= todo) currentTasks)
pure next
HandleNewTask (NewTodo todo) next -> do
currentTasks <- H.get
H.put (currentTasks `snoc` todo)
pure nextAnd that's it! We're done! Again, take a look at the Github repo for some more instructions on how you can run and interact with this code.
Conclusion
This wraps up our look at building simple UI's with Purescript. Next week we'll conclude our Purescript series. We'll look at some of the broader elements of building a web app. We'll see some basic routing as well as how to send requests to a backend server.
Elm is another great functional language you can use for Web UIs. To learn more about it, check out our recently concluded Elm Series!
Purescript II: Typeclasses and Monads
Last week, we started our exploration of Purescript. Purescript seeks to bring some of the awesomeness of Haskell to the world of web development. Its syntax looks a lot like Haskell's, but it compiles to Javascript. This makes it very easy to use for web applications. And it doesn't just look like Haskell. It uses many of the important features of the language, such as a strong system and functional purity.
If you need to brush up on the basics of Purescript, make sure to check out that first article again. This week, we're going to explore a couple other areas where Purescript is a little different. We'll see how Purescript handles type-classes, and we'll also look at monadic code. We'll also take a quick look at some other small details with operators. Next week, we'll look at how we can use Purescript to write some front-end code.
For another perspective on functional web development, check out our Haskell Web Series. You can also download our Production Checklist for some more ideas! You can also take a gander at our Elm Series for another frontend language!
Type Classes
The idea of type classes remains pretty consistent from Haskell to Purescript. But there are still a few gotchas. Let's remember our Triple type from last week.
data Triple = Triple
{ a :: Int
, b :: Int
, c :: Int
}Let's write a simple Eq instance for it. To start with, instances in Purescript must have names. So we'll assign the name tripleEq to our instance:
instance tripleEq :: Eq Triple where
eq (Triple t1) (Triple t2) = t1 == t2Once again, we only unwrap the one field for our type. This corresponds to the record, rather than the individual fields. We can, in fact, compare the records with each other. The name we provide helps Purescript to generate Javascript that is more readable. Take note: naming our instances does NOT allow us to have multiple instances for the same type and class. We'll get a compile error if we try to create another instance like:
instance otherTripleEq :: Eq Triple where
...There's another small change when using an explicit import for classes. We have to use the class keyword in the import list:
import Data.Eq (class Eq)You might hope we could derive the Eq typeclass for our Triple type, and we can. Since our instance needs a name though, the normal Haskell syntax doesn't work. The following will fail:
-- DOES NOT WORK
data Triple = Triple
{ a :: Int
, b :: Int
, c :: Int
} deriving (Eq)For simple typeclasses though, we CAN use standalone deriving. This allows us to provide a name to the instance:
derive instance eqTriple :: Eq TripleAs a last note, Purescript does not allow orphan instances. An orphan instance is where you define a typeclass instance in a different file from both the type definition and the class definition. You can get away with these in Haskell, though GHC will warn you about it. But Purescript is less forgiving. The way to work around this issue is to define a newtype wrapper around your type. Then you can define the instance on that wrapper.
Effects
In part 1, we looked at a small snippet of monadic code. It looked like:
main :: Effect Unit
main = do
log ("The answer is " <> show answer)If we're trying to draw a comparison to Haskell, it seems as though Effect is a comparable monad to IO. And it sort've is. But it's a little more complicated than that. In Purescript, we can use Effect to represent "native" effects. Before we get into exact what this means and how we do it, let's first consider "non-native" effects.
A non-native effect is one of those monads like Maybe or List that can stand on its own. In fact, we have an example of the List monad in part 1 of this series. Here's what Maybe might look like.
maybeFunc :: Int -> Maybe Int
mightFail :: Int -> Maybe Int
mightFail x = do
y <- maybeFunc x
z <- maybeFunc y
maybeFunc zNative effects use the Effect monad. These include a lot of things we'd traditionally associate with IO in Haskell. For instance, random number generation and console output use the Effect monad:
randomInt :: Int -> Int -> Effect Int
log :: String -> Effect UnitBut there are also other "native effects" related to web development. The most important of these is anything that writes to the DOM in our Javascript application. Next week, we'll use the purescript-react library to create a basic web page. Most of its main functions are in the Effect monad. Again, we can imagine that this kind of effect would use IO in Haskell. So if you want to think of Purescript's Effect as an analogue for IO, that's a decent starting point.
What's interesting is that Purescript used to be more based on the system of free monads. Each different type of native effect would build on top of previous effects. The cool part about this is the way Purescript uses its own record syntax to track the effects in play. You can read more about how this can work in chapter 8 of the Purescript Book. However, we won't need it for our examples. We can just stick with Effect.
Besides free monads, Purescript also has the purescript-transformers library. If you're more familiar with Haskell, this might be a better starting spot. It allows you to use the MTL style approach that's more common in Haskell than free monads.
Special Operators
It's worth noting a couple other small differences. Some rules about operators are a little different between Haskell and Purescript. Since Purescript uses the period operator . for record access, it no longer refers to function composition. Instead, we would use the <<< operator:
odds :: List Int -> List Int
odds myList = filter (not <<< isEven) myList
where
isEven :: Int -> Boolean
isEven x = mod x 2 == 0Also, we cannot define operators in an infix way. We must first define a normal name for them. The following will NOT work:
(=%=) :: Int -> Int -> Int
(=%=) a b = 2 * a - bInstead, we need to define a name like addTwiceAndSubtract. Then we can tell Purescript to apply it as an infix operator:
addTwiceAndSubtract :: Int -> Int -> Int
addTwiceAndSubtract a b = 2 * a - b
infixrl 6 addTwiceAndSubtract as =%=Finally, using operators as partial functions looks a little different. This works in Haskell but not Purescript:
doubleAll :: List Int -> List Int
doubleAll myList = map (* 2) myListInstead, we want syntax like this:
doubleAll :: List Int -> List Int
doubleAll myList = map (_ * 2) myListConclusion
This wraps up our look at the key differences between Haskell and Purescript. Now that we understand typeclasses and monads, it's time to dive into what Purescript is best at. Come back next week, and we'll look at how we can write real frontend code with Purescript!
For some more ideas on using Haskell for some cool functionality, download our Production Checklist! For another look at function frontend development, check out our recent Elm Series!
Getting Started with Purescript!
Our Haskell Web Series covers a lot of cool libraries you can use when making a web app. But one thing we haven't covered on this blog yet is using Haskell for front-end web development. There are a number libraries and frameworks out there. Yesod and Snap come to mind. Another option is Reflex FRP, which uses GHCJS under the hood.
But for this new series I've decided to take a different approach. For the next few weeks, we're going to be exploring the Purescript language. Purescript is a bit of a meld between Haskell and Javascript. Its syntax is like Haskell's, and it incorporates many elements of functional purity. But it compiles to Javascript and thus has some features that seem more at home in that language.
This week, we'll start out by exploring the basics of Purescript. We'll see some of the main similarities and differences between it and Haskell. We'll culminate this series by making a web front-end with Purescript. We'll connect this front-end to Haskell code on the back-end.
Purescript is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using functional languages in product! Check out our Production Checklist for some awesome Haskell libraries!
Getting Started
Since Purescript is its own language, we'll need some new tools. You can follow the instructions on the Purescript website, but here are the main points.
- Install Node.js and NPM, the Node.js package manager
- Run
npm install -g purescript - Run
npm install -g pulp bower - Create your project directory and run
pulp init. - You can then build and test code with
pulp buildandpulp test. - You can also use PSCI as a console, similar to GHCI.
First, we need NPM. Purescript is its own language, but we want to compile it to Javascript we can use in the browser, so we need Node.js. Then we'll globally install the Purescript libraries. We'll also install pulp and bower. Pulp will be our build tool like Cabal.
Bower is a package repository like Hackage. To get extra libraries into our program, you would use the bower command. For instance, we need purescript-integers for our solution later in the article. To get this, run the command:
bower install --save purescript-integersA Simple Example
Once you're set up, it's time to start dabbling with the language. While Purescript compiles to Javascript, the language itself actually looks a lot more like Haskell! We'll examine this by comparison. Suppose we want to find the all pythagorean triples whose sum is less than 100. Here's how we can write this solution in Haskell:
sourceList :: [Int]
sourceList = [1..100]
allTriples :: [(Int, Int, Int)]
allTriples =
[(a, b, c) | a <- sourceList, b <- sourceList, c <- sourceList]
isPythagorean :: (Int, Int, Int) -> Bool
isPythagorean (a, b, c) = a ^ 2 + b ^ 2 == c ^ 2
isSmallEnough :: (Int, Int, Int) -> Bool
isSmallEnough (a, b, c) = a + b + c < 100
finalAnswer :: [(Int, Int, Int)]
finalAnswer = filter
(\t -> isPythagorean t && isSmallEnough t)
allTriplesLet's make a module in Purescript that will allow us to solve this same problem. We'll start by writing a module Pythagoras.purs. Here's the code we would write to match up with the Haskell above. We'll examine the specifics piece-by-piece below.
module Pythagoras where
import Data.List (List, range, filter)
import Data.Int (pow)
import Prelude
sourceList :: List Int
sourceList = range 1 100
data Triple = Triple
{ a :: Int
, b :: Int
, c :: Int
}
allTriples :: List Triple
allTriples = do
a <- sourceList
b <- sourceList
c <- sourceList
pure $ Triple {a: a, b: b, c: c}
isPythagorean :: Triple -> Boolean
isPythagorean (Triple triple) =
(pow triple.a 2) + (pow triple.b 2) == (pow triple.c 2)
isSmallEnough :: Triple -> Boolean
isSmallEnough (Triple triple) =
(triple.a) + (triple.b) + (triple.c) < 100
finalAnswer :: List Triple
finalAnswer = filter
(\triple -> isPythagorean triple && isSmallEnough triple)
allTriplesFor the most part, things are very similar! We still have expressions. These expressions have type signatures. We use a lot of similar elements like lists and filters. On the whole, Purescript looks a lot more like Haskell than Javascript. But there are some key differences. Let's explore those, starting with the higher level concepts.
Differences
One difference you can't see in code syntax is that Purescript is NOT lazily evaluated. Javascript is an eager language by nature. So it is much easier to compile to JS by starting with an eager language in the first place.
But now let's consider some of the differences we can see from the code. For starters, we have to import more things. Purescript does not import a Prelude by default. You must always explicitly bring it in. We also need imports for basic list functionality.
And speaking of lists, Purescript lacks a lot of the syntactic sugar Haskell has. For instance, we need to use List Int rather than [Int]. We can't use .. to create a range, but instead resort to the range function.
We also cannot use list comprehensions. Instead, to generate our original list of triples, we use the list monad. As with lists, we have to use the term Unit instead of ():
-- Comparable to main :: IO ()
main :: Effect Unit
main = do
log "Hello World!"Next week, we'll discuss the distinction between Effect in Purescript and monadic constructs like IO in Haskell.
One annoyance is that polymorphic type signatures are more complicated. Whereas in Haskell, we have no issue creating a type signature [a] -> Int, this will fail in Purescript. Instead, we must always use the forall keyword:
myListFunction :: forall a. List a -> IntAnother thing that doesn't come up in this example is the Number type. We can use Int in Purescript as in Haskell. But aside from that the only important numeric type is Number. This type can also represent floating point values. Both of these get translated into the number type in Javascript.
Purescript Data Types
But now let's get into one of the more glaring differences between our examples. In Purescript, we need to make a separate Triple type, rather than using a simple 3-tuple. Let's look at the reasons for this by considering data types in general.
If we want, we can make Purescript data types in the same way we would in Haskell. So we could make a data type to represent a Pythagorean triple:
data Triple = Triple a b cThis works fine in Purescript. But, it forces us to use pattern matching every time we want to pull an individual value out of this element. We can fix this in Haskell by using record syntax to give ourselves accessor functions:
data Triple = Triple
{ a :: Int
, b :: Int
, c :: Int
}This syntax still works in Purescript, but it means something different. In Purescript a record is its own type, like a generic Javascript object. For instance, we could do this as a type synonym and not a full data type:
type Triple = { a :: Int, b :: Int, c :: Int}
oneTriple :: Triple
oneTriple = { a: 5, b: 12, c: 13}Then, instead of using the field names like functions, we use "dot-syntax" like in Javascript. Here's what that looks like with our type synonym definition:
type Triple = { a :: Int, b :: Int, c :: Int}
oneTriple :: Triple
oneTriple = { a: 5, b: 12, c: 13}
sumAB :: Triple -> Int
sumAB triple = triple.a + triple.bHere's where it gets confusing though. If we use a full data type with record syntax, Purescript no longer treats this as an item with 3 fields. Instead, we would have a data type that has one field, and that field is a record. So we would need to unwrap the record using pattern matching before using the accessor functions.
data Triple = Triple
{ a :: Int
, b :: Int
, c :: Int
}
oneTriple :: Triple
oneTriple = Triple { a: 5, b: 12, c: 13}
sumAB :: Triple -> Int
sumAB (Triple triple) = triple.a + triple.b
-- This is wrong!
sumAB :: Triple -> Int
sumAB triple = triple.a + triple.bThat's a pretty major gotcha. The compiler error you get from making this mistake is a bit confusing, so be careful!
Pythagoras in Purescript
With this understanding, the Purescript code above should make some more sense. But we'll go through it one more time and point out the little details.
To start out, let's make our source list. We don't have the range syntactic sugar, but we can still use the range function:
import Data.List (List, range, filter)
data Triple = Triple
{ a :: Int
, b :: Int
, c :: Int
}
sourceList :: List Int
sourceList = range 1 100We don't have list comprehensions. But we can instead use do-syntax with lists instead to get the same effect. Note that to use do-syntax in Purescript we have to import Prelude. In particular, we need the bind function for that to work. So let's generate all the possible triples now.
import Prelude
…
allTriples :: List Triple
allTriples = do
a <- sourceList
b <- sourceList
c <- sourceList
pure $ Triple {a: a, b: b, c: c}Notice also we use pure instead of return. Now let's write our filtering functions. These will use the record pattern matching and accessing mentioned above.
isPythagorean :: Triple -> Boolean
isPythagorean (Triple triple) =
(pow triple.a 2) + (pow triple.b 2) == (pow triple.c 2)
isSmallEnough :: Triple -> Boolean
isSmallEnough (Triple triple) =
(triple.a) + (triple.b) + (triple.c) < 100Finally, we can combine it all with filter in much the same way we did in Haskell:
finalAnswer :: List Triple
finalAnswer = filter
(\triple -> isPythagorean triple && isSmallEnough triple)
allTriplesAnd now our solution will work!
Conclusion
This week we started our exploration of Purescript. Syntactically, Purescript is a very near cousin of Haskell. But there are a few key differences we highlighted here about the nature of the language.
Next week, we'll look at some other important differences in the type system. We'll see how Purescript handles type-classes and monads. After that, we'll see how we can use Purescript to build a web front-end with some of the security of a solid type system.
Download our Production Checklist for some more cool ideas of libraries you can use!
Elm Series + Purescript Coming Up!
In the last few weeks, we've been quite busy learning about Elm. We're taking a quick break this week from new material. But we're pleased to announce that our Elm series is now a permanent fixture on the advanced section of the site! Here's a quick review of what we covered there:
- Part 1 covers the language basics. We learned how to install Elm, the basic syntax, and how it's different from Haskell.
- In part 2, we see Elm in its natural habitat, building a simple web application. We make a Todo list app that showcases how Elm's architecture works.
- Part 3 expands our vocabulary of Elm techniques. We use effects to incorporate randomness and send some HTTP requests.
- In the final part of the series, we learn the basics of navigation. We start by writing a very simple multi-page application. Then we see how the page changes hook into Elm's architecture.
Coming Up: Purescript!
But we're not done with functional frontend yet! Starting next week, we'll learn Purescript! Like Elm, it compiles to Javascript, but has a syntax very reminiscent of Haskell's. It incorporates even more of Haskell's language features than Elm. This makes it even easier to put our functional skills to use with it. So you won't want to miss this series!
If you'd like to stick to Haskell for now though, make sure to check out our other resources, like our Liftoff Series and our Web Skills Series. You can also subscribe to our newsletter and get access to all our awesome resources!
