flow-er-1.0.3: More directional operators

Control.Flower

Contents

Description

## Use

>>> import Control.Flower


## Rationale

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth,
but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture,
without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous
trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern
perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight,
the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of
the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
- Bertrand Russell, "The Study of Mathematics"

Inspired by the wonderful Flow package, Flower provides directional operators for many common Haskell functions.

With the pipe operator (|>) proliferating through OCaml, F#, and Elixir, it's becoming clear which way the wind is blowing. A dataflow model is very natural to functional programming.

Thinking in Haskell is multidimensional, reading forwards and backwards, and through levels of abstraction. This is extremely powerful, but does introduce a leaning curve (in grade school, when starting with Haskell, or both).

Here, instead of $, we use <|, or reversed with |>. Instead of <$>, we use <$, and reversed $>. Many of the combinators are built up from meaningful character combinations. One such example is lift2, which is translated into <$**. <$**, as 'f <\$ a <* b <* c'.

Please do note that Flower exposes conflicting combinators versus the standard Prelude.

### Teaching

Teaching concepts becomes simplified by providing a visual aid. Many of the operators are made up of simpler symbols, much in the same way as the Lens library.

One common challenge when teaching Haskell is showing what an applicative or monad "mean". By using a progressive, modular picture of each abstraction, we help build the intuition.

All lifts (fmap, liftA* and liftM*) are unified as lift*.