Adjunctions in the wild: foldl
I recently made a few connections that linked some different concepts in Haskell that I hadn’t realized before. They deal with one of my favorite “practical” libraries in Haskell, and also one of the more “profound” category theory-inspired abstractions in Haskell. In the process, it made the library a bit more useful to me, and also made the concept a bit more concrete and understandable to me.
This post mainly goes through my thought process in finding this out — it’s very much a “how I think through this” sort of thing — in the end, the goal is to show how much this example made me further appreciate the conceptual idea of adjunctions and how they can pop up in interesting places in practical libraries. Unlike most of my other posts, it’s not about necessarily about how practically useful an abstraction is, but rather what insight it gives us to understanding its instances.
The audience of this post is Haskellers with an understanding/appreciation of abstractions like Applicative
, but be aware that the final section is separately considered as a fun aside for those familiar with some of Haskell’s more esoteric types. The code samples used here (along with exercise solutions) are available on github.