[Haskell-cafe] (Co/Contra)Functor and Comonad

[Edward Kmett]

+1 for adding a Contrafunctor/ContraFunctor to base somewhere. But I agree
completely with Tony, please call it contramap. ;) Otherwise people will
wonder why comonads are not cofunctors -- a matter which can be cleared up
by avoiding sloppy terminology.

+1 for adding Comonads. As an aside, since Haskell doesn't have (nor could
it have) coexponential objects, there is no 'missing' Coapplicative concept
that goes with it, so there can be no objection on the grounds of lack of
symmetry even if the Functor => Applicative => Monad proposal goes through.

I have been meaning to split off a 'comonads' package from category-extras
for a while, in a way that avoids requiring tons of crazy machinery. I have
a candidate that I just need to polish up a bit and throw on hackage --
perhaps that could serve as a straw man proposal?

-Edward

On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 4:51 AM, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 24 December 2010 02:16, Mario Blažević <mblazevic at stilo.com> wrote:
>
> > To turn the proof obligation around, what could possibly be the downside
> of
> > adding a puny Cofunctor class to the base library?
>
> Hi Mario
>
> For the record I'm personally neutral on Cofunctor and on balance
> would like to see Comonad added to Base.
>
> My reservation is really at the "meta-level" - I suspect there are a
> lot of candidates for adding to Base if you want to Base to be
> systematic about "modeling structures". At the moment and possibly by
> accident rather than explicit intention, the structures in Base
> (Monoid, Applicative, Monad, Arrow) add good sets of operational
> combinators as well as modeling structures (in Monoid's case it only
> adds one operational combinator but it is the basis for Foldable, the
> Writer Monad and more).
>
> For Comonad, Cofunctor (Bifunctor, Semigroup...) not having the
> visibility of being in Base certainly means there is less motivation
> to discover valuable operations that use them, but should they go into
> Base without an initial strong operational value, instead maybe
> something between Base and Hackage is needed?
>
> Certainly, Hackage isn't great for developing "Base candidates". The
> bike shedding on the Libraries list, whilst frustrating for a
> proposer, is valuable for teasing out more regular designs than single
> authored packages often manage, and having lots of small packages for
> Base-like things is a dependency burden that hinders adoption.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Stephen
>
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