[Haskell-cafe] Representation of lenses

David Turner dct25-561bs at mythic-beasts.com
Tue Jan 27 20:29:49 UTC 2015


On 27 January 2015 at 17:23, Charles Durham <ratzes at gmail.com> wrote:
> You need to sign up for it, but this is a phenomenal talk by simon peyton
> jones describing the idea behind lenses the way he understood it.
>
> https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/4251-lenses-compositional-data-access-and-manipulation

Thanks, I think that was exactly what I needed to know.

If I understand the key section right, you can do all that stuff with
a straight get/set pair but it'd be desperately inefficient, so then
you add an update function, and then one at Maybe and [] and IO and
they all start to look the same so you generalise to all Functors, and
then you discover that using Const you get a getter, and Identity
gives you a setter, so you can throw them away and end up with a lens
as we know it.

And then you generalise it in about a billion other directions and you
end up with the lens library!

Much obliged,

David


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