Edmund Noble Member Talk

CSC member Edmund Noble will be giving a talk, titled "Purely Functional Programming with Freely-Generated Domain Specific Languages". The talk will focus on embedded DSLs that exist within other languages, and how they can easily be constructed. The abstract for this talk is below.

Dependency injection is an often-used technique in object-oriented programming to easily modify the behaviours of an object by providing it with objects it would have otherwise generated on its own, to increase modularity. Aspect-oriented programming is a related technique which adds additional behaviour ("advice") to existing code, aiming to address cross-cutting concerns which affect wide areas of an application without sacrificing modularity. Dependency injection might not seem a common topic in functional programming, but application modularity is essential to functional programming in a practical setting. A natural analogue to dependency injection and aspect-oriented programming in functional programming comes from a surprising place, and offers superior modularity to both. The free monad (F f) for a type constructor (and domain-specific language instruction set) f provides a syntax tree with internal nodes as domain-specific language instructions, which in combination with coproduct functors, allow domain-specific languages to be composed and combined easily.

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