fantasy-land VS cats

2. https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land (A bit heavy on jargon)

Note there is a python version of Ramda available on pypi and there’s a lot of FP tidbits inside JAX:

3. https://pypi.org/project/ramda/ (Worth making your own version if you want to learn, though)

4. For nested data, JAX tree_util is epic: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jax.tree_util.html and also their curry implementation is funny: https://github.com/google/jax/blob/4ac2bdc2b1d71ec0010412a32...

Anyway don’t put FP on a pedestal, main thing is to focus on the core principles of avoiding external mutation and making helper functions. Doesn’t always work because some languages like Rust don’t have legit support for currying (afaik in 2023 August), but in those cases you can hack it with builder methods to an extent.

Finally, if you want to understand the middle of the midwit meme, check out this wiki article and connect the free monoid to the Kleene star (0 or more copies of your pattern) and Kleene plus (1 or more copies of your pattern). Those are also in regex so it can help you remember the regex symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_monoid?wprov=sfti1

The simplest example might be {0}^* in which case

0: “” // because we use *

It was never really my jam, but I used to follow the up-and-coming fantasy-land specs with great interest. It just seemed like a sharp dedicated community of folks trying to figure out better fp & algebraic stuff. I'm not sure who trailed off - in general I feel like there's much less connection in tech world, that the tech twitter and every other ultra-active tech channel has somewhat decayed. https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land

Thanks for the links. I know I've seen @gcanti's name a thousand times already, but it's already quite murky to me what it was attached to. Something in this sphere.

Look at the implementations of Fantasy Land. List-in-JS might do the trick.

There are respective fantasy land and static land specs, with the law conformance checks.

While building a purely functional data structure library for personal fun and professional use, and while using other libraries, I found that the "Fantasy Land Specification" was mentioned from time to time. They use this hierarchy. Although I did read some about category theory (tried and failed to fully understand all the concepts), some of the terms used in the specification are unknown to me (like Chain, Apply). My question:

No: neither of those examples are "properties of futures and of lists as such." "Async/Await" in particular is a special case of monadic behavior of a concurrency monad. This specifically (infamously) came up in the evolution of the Prommise spec in ECMAScript, which in turn led to the development of the Fantasy Land Spec and various implementations of it.

If you're programming in TypeScript you can checkout the fantasy land spec. It provides a spec for all the algebraic structures used in the JS world. You can learn what they are. You'll want to find alternative resources to learn what they are how they work. Fantasy land is just a spec not a guide.

Javascript comes with this lovely little spec called Fantasy Land that defines certain type classes in Category Theory and how they interact.

A functional programming library: https://typelevel.org/cats/

Learn something that pays the bill first - nowadays it's Golang/Rust react/typescript. Then you can try some pure fp libs like fp-ts and fp-core.rs, and look through existing scala cats docs. If you'll feel bad about it - that's totally fine and expectable, fp takes a paradigm shift and not that many dev able to shift their brains way of thought due to basic psychological rigidity) (inability to change habits and to modify concepts/attitudes once developed). And that's purely a staffing and management issue - folks hired randoms out of the blue, and called 'em a team.

I'm sorry, but have you ever done functional programming for a real company, like in a functional programming language like Haskell, Scala, or F#? Have you ever used Scala cats or scalaz? Have you ever learned category theory and how to apply its abstractions in software? Listen u/judethedude2106 this person hasn't gone as far down the functional programming rabbit hole as I have. Beyond learning the basics like the difference between pure and impure functions, what are closures, what higher order functions are and the most common ones like .map, .filter, and .flatmap, the immutable collections like immutable linked lists and trees, and what a Monad is and common monads like those used for futures/promises, async programming, and Option (Some or None, which is used instead of null checking), the more advanced functional programming stuff like category theory based abstractions are totally useless for real jobs and is just a giant time suck. Don't waste years on functional programming, spend at most a few months on it and no more.

As a former functional programmer in Scala, please do not go deep into the Category Theory programming. Scala has libraries like this one called "Cats", a cute shortened name for "Category Theory", but code that makes heavy use of these constructs is not understandable to other programmers. Other than using Monads as a design pattern for things like Options (which can be "Some" or "None"), Futures or Promises (which is used for asynchronous programming), and a few other things, please do not make heavy use of category theory constructs in real programming projects that will have other developers working on them. It is a rabbit hole that may be fun but is not super practical. Sure, write pure functions without side effects, but do not use the words "Bimonad", "Invariant Monoidal", and "Semigroup" in your code. The most common, practical application/use of functional programming is basic things like closures, .map, .filter, maybe chaining maps with like a .flatmap or whatever your programming language uses instead of chain or flatmap, and SQL that uses keywords like WHERE which can be represented in code by using a call to .filter. Like the place where these constructs are used most is in data processing like with SQL, ETL (Extract Transform, Load) jobs, Java's MapReduce on Hadoop, Scala's Apache Spark, and other data processing type things. Haskell is not a popular programming language in real world projects for a number of reasons and one of them is the heavy and sometimes impractical use of Category Theory.

At a previous job of mine we actually had an entirely pure Scala ecosystem using cats which instead uses typeclasses, referential transparency, and other FP concepts as the foundations for how to code. So a lot of flexibility to the language.

Thanks! It's used heavily here

I did work in Scala for a few years. We employed Cats[1], and even a bit of Matryoshka[2] though most of the work I do today is in Python.

Nowadays I think about computational requirements in terms of relations among behavioral dependencies. Like, "I want to perform operation O on input A and return a B. To do this, I'll need a way to a -> b and a way to b -> b -> b." I often pass these behavioral dependencies in as arguments and it tends to make the inner core of my programs pretty abstract and built up as layers of specificity.

Zooming out nearly all the way, it makes me feel tethered in a qualitatively unique way to certain deep truths of the universe. In a Platonic sense, invoking certain ideas like a monad make me feel like I'm approaching the divine or at least one instantiation of a timeless universal that operates outside of material existence.

I'd imagine some mathematicians might see the universe in a similar way - one where immortal relations between ontological forms exist beyond time and space and at the same time can be threaded through the material world by intellectual observation and when those two meet a beautiful collision occurs.

1. https://typelevel.org/cats/

2. https://github.com/precog/matryoshka

Our second type class example attempted to illustrate one last perk: type safety at compile time. It did so with a simplified example of the cats core library for type safety equality comparison between objects. If you're not familiar with cats, go ahead and give it go.