Type classes vs interfaces

#42

I must say I don’t fully understand the purpose of the example given, but I do recall I used type families to “hide” “private information” in some other cases:

{-# LANGUAGE TypeFamilies #-}                                                
                                                                             
import Data.Kind (Type)                                                      
                                                                             
data Crust = ThickCrust | ThinCrust                                          
  deriving (Show, Eq, Ord)                                                   
data PizzaComponent = Salami | AmericanCheese                                
  deriving (Show, Eq, Ord)                                                   
data Pizza = Pizza Crust [PizzaComponent]                                    
  deriving (Show, Eq, Ord)                                                   
                                                                             
data Meal                                                                    
 = PreparedPizza Pizza                                                       
 -- | PreparedSandwich Sandwich                                              
 deriving (Show, Eq, Ord)                                                    
                                                                             
class Monad m => CPizzaRecipe m where                                        
                                                                             
class Monad m => CCookingMachine m where                                     
    type family PIZZA_RECIPE m :: Type -> Type                               
    cmakePizza :: PIZZA_RECIPE m Pizza -> m Pizza                            
    -- cmakeSandwitch :: CSandwichRecipe r => r Sandwich -> m Sandwich       
    cmakeRandomPizzaRceipe :: m (PIZZA_RECIPE m Pizza)                       
                                                                             
csampleCookingMachine                                                        
  :: forall m                                                                
   . CCookingMachine m                                                       
  => m [Meal]                                                                
csampleCookingMachine = do                                                   
  rndPizzaRecipe <- cmakeRandomPizzaRceipe                                   
  rndPizza <- cmakePizza rndPizzaRecipe                                      
  pure [{-PreparedPizza pizza,-} PreparedPizza rndPizza]
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#43

Your solution looks like another additional magic, but probably would be acceptable enough.

The task about the cooking machine is questionable of course, but the need for such solutions occurs in complex domains in OOP quite often. The need looks like this: there is some general system that produces some generalized results, and both of these should be abstracted out because they both are complex, and can be eventually extended. If not doing this, the code becomes fragile, less layered and much coupled. So it is valid to suppose that in FP, we might need something like this, too.

I’m thinking about having a declarative GUI, for example. I’m very sure that you can build a nicely organized uniformely looking type-safe extensible library for that using the Hierarchical Free Monads approach. No extra mechanisms would be needed. With type classes, existentials and type families it will have a much higher accidental complexity and probably a worser dev ux

#44

Re declarative GUI, take console UI library brick as an example, though I am not super familiar with it, here is how many type classes you can find from it https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ajtdaugherty%2Fbrick%20class&type=code. Very little indeed.

As a person alao having years’ of OO baggage, here’s an intuition:

  • Typeclasses are best suited for functional compositional concepts such as functors, applicative, monad etc. Its hierarchy is for conceptual generalization. See Typeclassopedia - HaskellWiki for inspiration.
  • Though because of its runtime dictionary carrying property, OO-like interfaces can be emulated with it. However, it’s very different in that there is by default no real run time dispatching; that you will have to use Typeable which is often a code smell in Haskell.
    • Something must be emphasized too is that you don’t need typeclasses perhaps for this “property”, after all it’s just a data type with bunch functions. I recall elm language doesn’t even have typeclasses.
  • Further more damningly, for OO people coming to Haskell trying to do things the old ways, typeclass may be further “abused” to model “hierarchical” relationships in data that is often subclasses in OO. Now that’s where we should probably really stop us further abusing typeclasses, and just use ADT?
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#45

A fun note perhaps, maybe the choice of word “class” was the culprit. In Agda e.g. it seems just a record type with an special “instance” keyword in addition:

record Functor {a} (F : Set a → Set a) : Set (suc a) where
  field
    fmap : ∀ {A B} → (A → B) → F A → F B

-- Instances may be declared either by constructing a record explicitly or by using copatterns:

instance
  ListFunctor₁ : Functor List
  ListFunctor₁ = record { fmap = map }

instance
  ListFunctor₂ : Functor List
  fmap {{ListFunctor₂}} = map

I am not familiar of the programming language history related to the keyword “class”. So I don’t know who is the one misused it first, or it simply started without a proper definition.

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#46

In C++, it’s “concepts”. I was able to implement the mtl style with concepts easily although with some C++ specific. However, I would avoid using concepts as an interface mechanism because it’s a type-level mess. Implementing the whole Haskell’s ecosystem of generic concepts (Foldable, Traversable etc) in C++ concepts makes a lot of sense, and people do it already

#47

Unironically, I’m doing exactly this in the next chapter of the Pragmatic Type-Level Design book that I’m currently writing. Type classes as interfaces. I have an excuse though. If it was a book about functional design, I would go with real interface-like abstractions. But it’s about the type-level design in which type classes play a significant role. And I’m going to use the results of this discussion to complement the material, so thank you for your insights!

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#48

Talking about multi-paradigm languages, C++ is the “pathological” one. C++ was my first language from decades ago, but I haven’t touched it for a while. Now that I look at it, its latest syntax is so different from what I knew of. For example, “constexpr” seems taking over the limelight from concepts lately too. I think Bartorz Milewski was from C++ community and he did lots of porting of Haskell stuff to C++ that nobody asked for it (/jk).

I suspect many Haskell98/2010 old timers coming back to Haskell would feel quite the same way.

For entertaining, I am just gonna throwing another wrench to the mix. Here is a tongue-in-cheek “strongly duck typing” using GHC (not Haskell admittedly to some folks) HasField and overloaded dot extensions etc.:

{- cabal:
build-depends: base, constraints, text
default-language: GHC2021
-}
{-# LANGUAGE ConstraintKinds       #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DataKinds             #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DuplicateRecordFields #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedRecordDot   #-}


-- Taking an OO example from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/JavaScript/Objects/Object-oriented_programming

import           Data.Constraint (Dict)
import           Data.Kind       (Constraint, Type)
import           Data.Text       (Text)
import           GHC.Records     (HasField (..))

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Toy Object-Oriented Domain
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

data PersonHood = MkPersonHood
    { personalPublicRecord   :: Text
    , personalPrivateHistory :: Text
    }

data Subject = Math
             | OtherStuff

newtype Paper = MkPaper Text

newtype Grade = MkGrade Int
-- use mkYear to create valid grade values.

newtype Year = MkYear Int
-- use mkYear to create valid year values.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Interfaces
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- What is a person?
type IPerson r = ( HasField "name" r String
                 , HasField "introduceSelf" r (r -> IO ())
                 )
-- A data type for a person.
data Person r = MkPerson { name          :: String     -- static function
                         , introduceSelf :: r -> IO () -- member function
                         }

data Student = MkStudent { _person :: Person Student
                         , year    :: Year
                         }

-- NOTE: I wish this could work
-- @@
-- instance HasField x (Person Student) a => HasField x Student a where
--   getField (MkStudent { _person = p }) = getField @x (getField @"_person" p)
-- @@
-- NOTE: ugly boilerplate that can be done via TH or something similar to above?
instance HasField "name" Student String where
  getField (MkStudent { _person = p}) = p.name
instance HasField "introduceSelf" Student (Student -> IO ()) where
  getField (MkStudent { _person = p}) = p.introduceSelf

data Professor = MkProfessor { _person :: Person Professor
                             , year    :: Year
                             , teaches :: [Subject]
                             }

dramaticEntrance :: IPerson p => p -> IO ()
dramaticEntrance p = print $ "GM Y'all, I am " ++ p.name ++ "!!"

-- This is duck-typing!
introduce :: IPerson r => r -> IO ()
introduce p = do
  print $ "Here is our next person, " <> p.name
  p.introduceSelf p

main = do
  let bob = MkStudent (MkPerson "Bob" dramaticEntrance) (MkYear 2023)
  introduce bob
  print "Bye!"

Notice that dramaticEntrance and introduce have the “duck typing” feelings, but a bit stronger. Some may call it “row types” as far as I recall.

Some boilerplate still required, but I think with some more dark GHC magic, it may make a quite decent OO-style subclassing framework.

But why?

#49

Well, this is very much OOPish now to me. I would also ask the same - but why.

Let me clarify why I don’t think that my approaches are OOP although the borders are very blured today, and there is no a single view on what OOP is.

I’ve implemented a working Free-monad based monadic STM in C++ with the same interface as Haskell’s STM has. It doesn’t feel OOPish at all. It’s definitely FP although we might want to discuss whether it’s the imperative programming already.

So monadic, pure and declarative to me is much more FPish than it’s OOPish. Yes, it uses similar ideas to encapsulate some behaviour behind a (Free monad) interface, and even looks like OOP’s aggregation, and even can mimic OOP quite close, but it’s still monadic and functional. Your Free monad scripts/“objects” are chains of immutable computations while OOP’s class implementations aren’t.

Well, they actually can mimic it, and OOP can suddenly be turned into a kind of FP (I guess “Elegant objects” fit into this category), and this is where the borders become totally vague.

So monadic programming to me is FP and is much bigger than imperative/OOP programming. This all is, of course, debatable from the theoretical POV, but I’m interested in practice and how to write a good code.

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#50

I mean, you wrote some type-class-based code that makes no sense to you (given your “how to make this compile?”) and doesn’t make sense to me either and then you concluded that it demonstrates something. I think it only demonstrates that you haven’t created enough proofs-by-lack-of-imagination to recognize them (I’ve made way too many of those).

I can keep the bottom block of your code (after csampleCookingMachine) intact and mechanically transform the free monad stuff to classes without turning my brain on using the trick I told you about earlier.

You may argue that QuantifiedConstraints and friends are a bit much and it would be fair, but they are just quality of life improvements, the same can be done without them if you actually translate the types right.

Admittedly, both approaches are more complex than yours, but the first one is a mechanic translation that is more ergonomic than your approach (see the referenced above blog post for details) and is more expressive when it comes to higher-order effects (I might be wrong about that one, it’s been a long time).

As a bonus, I can tell you why people don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about while you seem to bump into such problems a lot: it’s because you reify effects as data in user space and this just isn’t something that others to a lot. Even algebraic effect folks who are comfortable with effects being data in their library of choice do not commonly return polymorphic effectful computations from other effectful computations (partially because there’s rarely need for that, partially because it’s a pain as is visible from this thread). To be very concrete, in the real world PizzaRecipe wouldn’t be an effect like in your code (you basically encode effects with Free) and it doesn’t even make sense in your own contrived example to begin with, since given the definition

data PizzaConstructor next
 = MakeCirclePizza Crust [PizzaComponent] (Pizza -> next)
 | MakeSquarePizza Crust [PizzaComponent] (Pizza -> next)

type PizzaRecipe a = Free PizzaConstructor a

what are you even going to do with a Pizza once you get it from either of constructors? Stack it on top of another pizza to get a higher-order pizza or something?

So yeah PizzaRecipe would be a normal data type and not anything effectful like a Free monad or a constraint or whatever and then all your problems are completely gone as you can now suddenly return a PizzaRecipe from cmakeRandomPizzaRceipe without attempting to sneak a polymorphic effectful computation into the result of another effectful computation.

I do admit there may be value in reifying effects as data. I just don’t think it’s a good basis to build your entire software development methodology on.

Having written all of that, I’m still not confident about anything, it feels like there’s some kind of a general rule about data vs effects hidden in here that I’m failing to see. I’m not sure why you seem to be so confident.

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#51

Yes of course. I’m not following why you think Haskell (or FP in general) lacks interfaces. The input interface is the argument type(s); the output interface is the result type.

With type classes, you can make the result type depend on the input type(s), via Type Functions/FunDeps – or even make the input types depend on the result type (demand-driven interface).

a) Why ‘runtime’? Don’t we want static type safety?
b) I’da thought Type Classes are exactly the mechanism.

I agree you might get a pile-up of Class constraints. That’s a different criticism vs “won’t allow”.

Yeah. There is that. We need a snappy term for overloadable-bunch-of-methods-that-contain-no-data.

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#53

@effectfully Your arguments sound too weak to me. Sorry, I’m not convinced yet.

Type-class based code makes sense to me because it follows the Free monadic counterpart to demonstrate the difference. And what’s so wrong with it? This code looks pretty valid from the domain point of view (might be the question of why we want such a strange domain but that’s a separate question):

The Free monadic counterpart works and looks great. I’ve expanded it for better demonstrability and updated the gist:

sampleCookingMachine :: CookingMachine [Meal]
sampleCookingMachine = do
 pizza <- makePizza (makeCirclePizza ThickCrust [])

The difference between the mechanisms is clear, and it’s a fact.

This is not an argument to me. You can mechanically transform it into Assembly/Machine code (which we all do constantly), but this doesn’t mean the two solutions are equal from the developer’s point of view. I can mechanically transform my Free monadic approach into the Service Handle pattern, but it will be quite a different solution, with its own design issues and subtle differences that are important.

class (CPizzaRecipe m, CSandwichRecipe m) => CCookingMachine m where
  withRandomPizzaRecipe :: ((forall p. CPizzaRecipe p => p Pizza) -> m b) -> m b

makePizza :: CCookingMachine m => (forall p. CPizzaRecipe p => p Pizza) -> m Meal
makePizza receipe = undefined

makeSandwich :: CCookingMachine m => (forall p. CSandwichRecipe p => p Sandwich) -> m Meal
makeSandwich receipe = undefined

This all looks like that I really want to avoid such a code in my projects. There is nothing to be proud of here, it’s a lot of accidental complexity that is unneeded and unnecessary unless it’s really, really justified.

Your referenced blog post wasn’t convincing to me long ago, and it isn’t today.

Apparently, the fact that people don’t do this, isn’t an argument against my approaches. It only tells that people didn’t know about other ways to do stuff. And I’m happy I could show a highly different solution that was unique to Haskell and turned out to be both very powerful and very simple.

You keep calling it “effects”, but it’s not effects to me in this particular example, and neither they are subsystems.

In my FDaA book, I’m dedicating half of it to Domain-Driven Design, and half of it to building an application framework. You’d call the latter “an effect system” and “effects”, but I prefer “framework” and “subsystems” because it’s what it is in 95% of all other programming languages. Here, however, we’re doing Domain-Driven Design, and there are no “effects” here, it’s how the business domain is organized. The task itself might be questionable a little but nevertheless it works for demonstrating the difference.

So I would really argue agains doing DDD with type classes. I might understand using the type classes for “effects”/application frameworks though.

Not an argument to me. There is a methodology, and it doesn’t care how you evaluate the “goodness” of its fundamentals. It may exist, - it has a right to exist, - it must exist to provide people a choice. The opposite would be not having the methodology at all.

Given that I’m still not convinced by your arguments, I’m sure that my methodology works and works quite well. I’m confident because it’s proven in practice and is the most formulated and most described methodology in Haskell.

#54

@AntC2

Sorry, I’m failing to see the sense behind this phrase.

You can do a lot of things with a lot of things. Some of them mimic others under some circumstances. This doesn’t mean that the division into interface-like abstractions and genericity-like abstractions stops working. Mimicking reveals the subtle differences between the solutions as we demonstrated in in this thread, and there are even more differences we haven’t yet discussed. But type classes do not fit into the interface-like category.

Static type safety isn’t lost. It’s quite a different dimension to consider, it has nothing to do with runtime-ness. One doesn’t exclude others, and having a runtime polymorphism doesn’t mean everything gets untyped. Quite the opposite. It remains well-typed and statically checked by the compiler.

#55

I think you are right in saying that this type of interface can’t be fully represented by type class (I think that was the starting point of this thread, wasn’t it?)

However, were I disagree (strongly) is wether that type of abstraction and moreover hiding/encapsulating and allowing the client to substitute thing in runtime is a good thing or not.

You seem to think that it is universally a good principle where is it comming from ?

Moreover, you are saying that interfaces have nothing to do with OOP (I mean the interface you are defining them above) but being able to change A by B at runtime because they both have the same I interface is the start of hierarchy tree (A < I, B < I). Add to the mix that I don’t (as a I user) don’t know the detail of what A or B will do (encapsulation, dynamic dispatching) is exactly what OOP is, isn’t it ?

#56

It certainly comes from my OOP practice, but not because it’s an OOP asset. OOP has been exploiting it a lot more than other paradigms. But I can think of substituting Docker images at runtime, substituting Erlang actors at runtime, and even substituting computer hardware at runtime. These are all the things that interact via interfaces (sometimes called specifications and protocols). For an external storage device, it doesn’t matter how complex it is inside, but it does matter that it can be plugged in via USB. So this is a general engineering principle.

OOP is not only about hierarchies, and there are many various kinds of hierarchies there (inheritance and aggregation; and probably some others). I personally wouldn’t define OOP either through hierarchies of interfaces or through hierarchies of objects. I’d define OOP through stateful mutable communicating objects.

#57

Well, maybe you should.

Is the 20 characters min necessary?
#58

Imperative programming has interfaces all the way down. The C language lacks any notion that could reflect a Java-like interface, and there is nothing like C++ classes in C. However, the Linux kernel code contains a lot of interfaces for various subsystems in form of data structures and like-typed methods with bare pointers.

#59

This thread is getting too long.

It’s okay if you want to talk your own book. But if we were to have a discussion, we gotta have the same common ground and definitions, isn’t it.

Maybe a more productive thread (a new one again??) is to focus how to achieve a desired goal using different methodology (OOP and runtime dispatching, vs. Some-FP typeclass-type static dispatching).

The desired goal, as far as I can extract from this long thread, is about encapsulation. Encapsulation itself may be a means to an even higher goal in software engineering: that is maintainability for future refactoring and keep use site code free of burden from implementation detail changes. Something like that?

2 Likes
#60

They don’t sound particularly strong to me either.

Sure, I wasn’t trying to suggest that the two solutions were equal in power. What I was doing is making the example that you’d given us work without Free to demonstrate that it can be done, which I think is what we were discussing?

I agree with that.

Yes.

I thought all that pizza stuff was a metaphor for your subsystems thingy, but if it was just an exercise in domain-modelling, then I have no idea what we’re even discussing here, I rarely need free monads to represent a part of a business domain. If I was to model whatever that business domain is, I’d make PizzaRecipe a data and avoid all the trouble, it’s not that people who use type classes plug them into every hole.

I don’t like representing data using type classes either, but now that I have no confidence in whether our vocabularies and perception of the discussion context overlap enough to even be able to communicate reasonably, I have no idea whether I understood you correctly or whether you’re going to understand me correctly.

You can create as many methodologies as you want, I’m not attempting to regulate any of your activities, I’m just expressing my personal opinion.

Do you happen to have any reviews by happy developers who use your methodology?

1 Like
#61

I believe this topic does no longer relate to the thread. We can discuss it in a separate thread if you wish (I personally don’t see that much interest in arguing about it)

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#62

Trait ?
Protocol ?
…filler…,