Type-safe Transducers in Clojure, Scala, and Haskell | Hacker News Reader

Type-safe Transducers in Clojure, Scala, and Haskell

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74 pointsluu11 comments

This line made me laugh out loud: "... whenever something is even slightly ugly in Scala, you introduce an implicit to make it confusing instead."

Odersky wrote a simple implementation, and it looks a lot nicer. It also doesn't use any casts or implicit conversaions: https://gist.github.com/odersky/6b7c0eb4731058803dfd

True. In retrospect, trying to make the Scala transducer type look like Haskell and then hacking into working order was didn't do justice to either language. As I sort of note in the text, the attempt to do it this way was at least partially meant to be "amusing."

This is interesting, but it's still missing some very important features of transducers. As you alluded, stateful operations [1] won't work at all in your Haskell model. Also, you've missed early termination [2], which Rich's talk [3] covered well.

[1] https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/b01adb859c66322c5cff...

[2] https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/b01adb859c66322c5cff...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbuzafcII

>As you alluded, stateful operations [1] won't work at all in your Haskell model.

Couldn't you just parametrize over IO/ST/etc.? E.g. something like

    IO r -> a -> IO r

I don't have a great mental model of transducers yet, so I'm not confident about that.

You can just include local state.

    data Fold i o = forall st . Fold
      { merge :: st -> i -> st
      , this  :: st
      , view  :: st -> o
      }

    type (i ~> o)  = forall r . Fold o r      -> Fold i r
    -- compare
    type Trans i o = forall r . (r -> o -> r) -> (r -> i -> r)

Now each "step" has local pure state and no other step can break abstraction barriers and view it. This also gives you all of the effects of the indexed state passing Rich called untypeable.

Fold is equivalent to an infinite state Moore machine, so a stack of composed transducers applied to a base Moore machine which produces whatever result you want can be compiled a really efficient form.

Early termination can be done by changing `merge` to `merge :: st -> i -> Either o st`.

You can do that, but it's more elegant if you define a functional stateful transducer analogous to scanl for lists.

That's like saying "your program is more elegant if it has no monads". It's an incorrect statement. The monadic version is perfectly elegant. Even better: it's the right one.

By the same logic scanl should just have the type:

    (b -> IO a) -> [b] -> IO [a]

instead of

    (a -> b -> a) -> a -> [b] -> [a]

Just putting the whole thing in the IO/ST monad isn't the right solution when you need a very specific form of local state.

There's more missing than that, but, in the spirit of early termination, I had to stop somewhere! Specifically to your points: 1. To preempt the faithful: Stateful transducers don't work (for a broad definition of work) in Clojure or Scala either. It's just that there's no tradition of acknowledging state via type in those languages. 2. Early termination is weird. In Clojure it's a property of the accumulated reduction value, i.e. not the transducer, the reducing function or the reducer/collection. I'm not sure yet whether to try modeling this via type or to try sticking it somewhere else. 3. Rich's talk is great. Also, it's been transcribed: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

See here for points (1) and (2): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532710

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