In his propositions as types talk, Philip Wadler contrasts programming languages that have been ‘invented’ with those that have been ‘discovered’. “And you can tell!” he exclaims, receiving giggles from the audience. Regardless of how you feel about mathematical platonism, I think Phil is pointing at a meaningful difference in the way certain ideas arise.

I love bound - it makes De Bruijn indices mindlessly easy. I also love Plated for all sorts of whole-program transformations. I think they’re two indispensible tools for working with programming languages. Unfortunately, they’re not compatible.

A certain algorithmic puzzle website has a problem that goes like this…

It’s difficult to learn functional programming without hearing about continuations. Often they’re mentioned while talking about boosting the performance of pure functional code, sometimes there’s talk of control flow, and occasionally with ‘time-travel’ thrown in there to make it all seem more obscure. It’s all true, but let’s start from the beginning.

LINQ is a system that provides a flexible query interface for .NET languages. It allows a user to write queries over arbitrary data using an in-built SQL-like syntax. This syntactic sugar is mapped to method calls at compile time, so any data structure that implements the correct methods can be used with LINQ.

With so many programming languages and frameworks at our disposal, it is too easy to believe that knowledge of many tools is the defining characteristic of a good programmer. However, many experienced programmers will assert that it isn’t the languages you know, but your ability to solve problems that defines you as a programmer.

Monad transformers combine the functionality of two monads into one. They are often used as a way to “flatten” nested monads, but are also used to enable interactions between monads that, when used seperately, would be incredibly difficult to implement.