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I don't know about famous, but Conal Elliots ideas about denotational semantics have led to some beautifully elegant libraries - http://conal.net/blog/posts/denotational-design-with-type-cl...

Don't be put off by the academic tone, at its heart the paper is about how to design abstractions.

This looks awesome, thanks. How to design abstractions was what I had in mind when posing the question.

I really enjoy reading Conals work. This paper is a particularly good example of how denotational semantics can guide the design of a library - http://conal.net/blog/posts/paper-beautiful-differentiation/