23.2.09

 

Conal Elliott on Type class morphisms

Just read Conal Elliott's draft paper Denotational design with type class morphisms. I thought the same point was made more succinctly and with more substance in his earlier paper Simply efficient functional reactivity. Many of us already know what is in the new paper, but it still makes a valuable point. However, I think it should be a Functional Pearl, and it might work twice as well if it were half as long.

Conal is right to put forward type class morphisms as a design principle. However, I think he oversells their utility. In Section 6, he states that the fact the laws of an applicative functor are satisfied for TMap come 'for free', but they are 'free' only because he assumes you have already verified the same laws for (->), which is isomorphic to TMap.

The principle of type class morphisms is closely related to a design principle elucidated by John Reynolds in his paper Using Category Theory to Design Implicit Conversions and Generic Operators: implicit conversions between types should be homomorphisms on generic operators (that is, on overloaded operations defined by both types).

12.2.09

 

What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

The World Question Center asks a different question every year, and the title links to one of my favorites.

11.2.09

 

Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Clay Shirky on what we can accomplish if we stop watching tv.
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.


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